Venezuelas Untergang - Kapitel CCCLXXXVIII

Wie kann ich über den fortschreitenden Untergang meines Landes sprechen und etwas Positives bewirken?

Die Regierung Venezuelas hat viele Schulden und unter ihnen befinden sich Schulden in Höhe von $1 Milliard für die Kosten der Benutzung von Schifffahrtscontainern. Der Grund für diese Summe ist, dass die Container, die für die Einfuhr so vieler Waren benutzt werden, mit viel Verspätung an die Transportfirmen zurückgegeben werden. Dies ist wiederum mit der sehr hohen Ineffizienz und Korruption im Land der Chavistas.

Die Opposition hat über 1.5 Millionen Unterschriften gesammelt, um ein Referendum zu veranlassen. Der Wahlrat, der völlig der Regierung untertänig ist, wird das Verfahren so weit es geht erschweren. Viele denken, dass das Referendum erst im Jahr 2017 stattfinden wird. Das würde bedeuten, dass auch wenn Maduro weggehen muss, Venezuela keine neue Wahlen haben würde, denn dann würde Maduro lediglich vom Vizepräsident ersetzt werden und der ist ein Chavista.

Die Mangelwirtschaft verschärft sich. Menschen müssen immer länger Schlange stehen und finden immer weniger. Selbst der sehr bekannte Musiker Yordano twittert mittlerweile, um zu fragen, ob man irgendwo bestimmte Medizinen findet, die er seit seiner Krebserkrankung nötig hat.

Die Politiker der deutschen Linksextremisten sagen aber immer noch, dass die ganze Katastrophe in Venezuela Folge eines Wirtschaftskrieges ist.

Francisco denkt, dass Maduro nicht so plump als Politike sein kann, wenn noch 30% der Bevölkerung eine positive Meinung über seine Regierung hat, während Roussef in Brasilien über nur ein Drittel dieser Popularität verfügt. Diese Zahlen so zu interpretieren wäre aber falsch. Die meisten Venezolaner, vor allem ausserhalb Caracas, Valencia und Maracaibo, können kaum regierungskritische Fernsehsender sehen und viel weniger lesen Zeitungen.

¿Qué nos dice CEPAL ahora del 2016?

Estas son las proyecciones del crecimiento del PIB que tiene la CEPAL para Suramérica en 2016. Como pueden ver, Venezuela es clase aparte una vez más. Los de la extrema izquierda en Europa hablan de una guerra económica...hay que tener morros para decir esto.

Según estos datos, el PIB de Venezuela caerá en un 6,9% en 2016.

A day in the life of a good engineer in Venezuela

Prices of most important household products are regulated in Venezuela of the "21 Century Socialism". The government does this at the same time as it keeps three currency exchange rates and currency controls that generate much more corruption and at the same time it keeps printing bank notes as if no one in the government knew anything about basic economics.

The horrible shortages product of these stupid economic policies have led the government to force citizens to buy controlled products only two days a week according to the last digit of their ID.

This is the account I got from a couple in Valencia. These friends are two formerly middle-class engineers who now can be classified simply as poor.

My time for shopping according to my ID was on Monday. I didn't find sugar, maize or wheat flour, rice, pasta, milk, butter, soap, tooth paste or shampoo in the main supermarkets. My husband went to queue up in front of the drugstore at 4 am. He got position 80. I got there at 7 am, shortly before the shop opened. When there were only 30 persons before me, the drugstore didn't have any more products with regulated prices.

I decided then to go to the Chinese shop as I had heard a lorry with pasta had arrived. I waited there from 10 to 1pm but I couldn't get anything when black market vendors tried to jump the queue and fighting broke out.

I gave up as I had to pick up our daughter from school.

Most of the people I see in the shops are actually from Southern Valencia, from towns of Güigüe, Miranda, Puerto Cabello, etc [a region with over 2 million people] because they do not find anything where they live.

She is one of the many who lost her job last year and she does little jobs here and there. There is no jobseeker allowance in Venezuela. Still, we  have 33% of the population that is still Chavista, just like 2, 3 years ago. They even believe things are worse in Spain.

Chicken and mathematics or how Chavismo's destroying my country

A friend of mine went shopping in Caracas. He was looking for some discount in the small poultry case of the local supermarket and while sifting through things he discovered, between a few chicken legs, an improvised ad:

"Maths specialist. Home lessons. Guaranteed comprehension and success.
Any day. Any time (Name and mobile number)"

Let's go to the chicken wings, though: the price is 1070 Bs a kilo. Instead of translating that into euros or dollars - very few Venezuelans earn either of them -, I'll translate that into a university professor's salary: that is equivalent to 1/19 to 1/39 of what she or he earns in a month. A school teacher earns less, of course.

Mind: you need more than a professor's full monthly salary to be able to rent a tiny flat in a working class area in any major city of Venezuela now.

My parents were a teacher and a professor in public - i.e. free- institutions before Chávez came to power and their salaries gave them a purchasing power that was much higher than anything teachers have in Venezuela of the "XXI Century Socialism".

I forgot to mention: my friend is also a professor. He was one of the very best at university. He would easily have a top job in Europe or in the USA. In Venezuela, though, he has to give maths lessons after his normal work at university in order to buy discount chicken wings.

Schon wieder verschwindet eine regimekritische Zeitung in Venezuela

Ab heute wird die venezolanische Zeitung El Carabobeño aufhören, als Druckausgabe zu erscheinen. Der Grund ist nicht, dass die Leute sie nicht mehr kaufen wollen. Die Druckausgabe wird es jetzt nicht mehr geben, weil die chavistische Regierung keine Dollars für die Einfuhr von Druckmaterial an diese unabhängige Zeitung geben will. In Venezuela entscheidet die Regierung wer wie viele Dollars und zu welchem Preis bekommt. In Venezuela, wo Internet so langsam und Internetzahlungen so beschränkt sind, bedeutet dies praktisch, dass diese Zeitung kaum Einfluss haben wird.

El Carabobeño war zwar eine Regionalzeitung, sie war aber die wichtigste in der Region zwischen Yaracuy und Aragua, mit Mittelpunkt in Valencia, meiner Stadt. Sagen wir das mal so: das war die wichtigste Zeitung in einem Gebiet, wo über 3 Millionen Venezolaner leben.

Chavismo jailing journalists

The publisher of one of the few remaining critical newspapers in Venezuela, Correo del Caroní, has been sentenced to prison for defamation after his newspaper denounced a very real corruption case at a state company.

Here you have (in Spanish) the position of Correo del Caroní.

My founding fathers and mothers

Yesterday I read this post about the Bolívar cult by Mónica Correa. I liked it a lot, although I disagree with the details about when the cult started. Correa, like many other Venezuelans, consinders the personality cult around Bolívar started really when Guzmán Blanco came to power. As German historian Norbert Rehrmann and others indicated, it was rather Bolívar himself who initiated the mental cult.

Then it was Antonio José Páez who re-started the cult in the early forties of the XIX century, when the world price for coffee - Venezuela's main export back then- plummeted and popular unrest threatened Venezuela's stability. Páez needed a big event to gain popularity.

You should read this decree by Páez to understand how he initiated the cult to this figure.

Many Venezuelans now would find it hard to believe Antonio José Páez would have been the actual promoter of the Bolívar cult. Venezuelans were taught from early on about the very real conflicts that separated Bolívar and Páez once Bolivar focused on his idea of governing the Gran Colombia. The thing is that what happened between Bolívar and Páez didn't prevent the latter to use the myth of the former in order to gain popularity. That is how he brought Bolívar's bones to Caracas from Colombia, how he tried to call Caracas Bolivar (at the end people would rename Angostura Bolívar, but that happened a bit later), how he organised Bolivar cult ceremonies in every Plaza Mayor of Venezuela then - those Plazas Mayores are now called Plazas Bolivar. Páez was also the one who reverted a law that had been introduced in order to stop the cult of the caudillo in congress. Páez was the one who started bringing marble statues of Bolívar from Europe.

The post's comments ended up revolving around the idea of "founding fathers". I thought about that as well and I wondered why it was that I never had such a fixation with the military men that ruled my country. The reason, I realised was that my founding fathers - and mothers - were very different from what I got at school.

My founding fathers and mothers were Spanish settlers from the XVI to the XIX century fleeing poverty in Spain. My founding fathers and mothers were the native Americans who lived for so long before around the then beautiful Valencia Lake, people who produced those petroglyphs and who cooked those arepas and wove those cotton clothes we hardly know about. My founding fathers and mothers were the black slaves who came from Western Africa with nothing but chains and humour and music and energy and probably many other things in their minds that we are no longer aware of because that is how history works.

My founding fathers and mothers were my great-grandparents and grandparents who worked very hard in their humble conucos,  their small land plots, to grow corn, beans, tomatoes and cotton, to raise chickens and pigs to feed their family and others.

My founding fathers and mothers were those who taught so many children to read and write, to count, who helped young adults to think analytically about economic issues, who introduced modern health practices in Venezuelan villages that until then were in conditions similar to those of Europe's Middle Ages.

If there was the need for any other kind of "founding fathers", my father and mother brought me to public talks of scientists Fernández Morán and Jacinto Convit and showed me - I was so lucky - the theatre work of poet Aquiles Nazoa. My sisters even took part in Nazoa's children theatre group.

My own founding father and mother taught me the magic of producing food and making something technical work.

My founding parents were actual doers, not military men.

I am convinced we can reshape what kind of myths and role models we need. Other countries have done so.