Thursday, September 08, 2005

Skeletons out of the closet to protest plight of the young in Venezuela It’s sort of hard to know what to make of this story. This morning, roughly 70 skeletons were seen hanging around Caracas, as a form of protest over the Government. The police immediately suggested that this was a terrorist act and the skeletons contained some form of toxic substance that intoxicated two cops. Well, a group calling itself “Cambio” (Change) took responsibility this afternoon for it, saying this was a non-violent protest and that the charges of a toxic substance being present “could only be understood as the attempt, typical of Cuban intelligence of neutralizing, taking legitimacy out of a form of democratic struggle, which is non-violent and original against the tyranny and as another episode in the strategy to seed fear and shut up any voice of protest The group claims represent the young and be protesting against the way the Government treats young people. They say that young people between 15 and 24 are the most affected by shootings with handguns. They point out official Government statistic saying that 2,500 people have been killed by security forces since Chavze took over, but there are more than 3,550 cases denounced to the Prosecutor’s office. The group argues that the Government says that this ahs always happened in Venezuela, but they note that in the four years prior to Chavez’ election there were only 540 such cases. “These skeletons that we plant all over Caracas today are only a reflection of what the policies of the regimen have done to Venezuelans. We experience death and misery. Venezuela requests a change” Well, it is hard to tell if the skeletons were toxic or not, but the police have not explained how come only two cops acting together suffered from this. If they were not toxic, this form of protest represents an interesting and novel form of protest against some very valid and relevant issues. 9:38:38 PM    comment []

Hat off to the Prosecutor's Office You have to give credit when credit is due. In july I wrote this post about the strange manipualtion of the case of the accident in which the former head of the Land Institute Eliezer Otaiza was involved. Evidence was apparently being manipualted, procedures were not followed and the police suggested there was some sort of "phantom" car that nobody saw involved. But soemthing happened, there were too many witnesses or someone cared sufficiently and today Otaiaza was charged with voluntary manslaughter by the Prosecutor's office. Whatever the reason, hats off to the Prosecutor's office and hopefully there will be justice for the woman killed in that accident. 9:16:46 PM    comment []

A cartoon with pictures is worth twenty thousand words If the ancient Chinese proverb "A picture is worth ten thousand words" is correct, then a Weil cartoon with pictures must be worth 20,000 words. The text says: "And while they criticize the work in New Orleans..." 8:31:06 PM    comment []

Onwards the pretty robolution part II On August 21st. of this year I reported how the brother of the Minister of Justice Jesse Chacon, had recently purchased an investment bank called Bankinvest of which he is now President, despite the fact that in 1997 he was not a wealthy man, having participated in the 1992 coup attempt, for which he spent sometime in jail. Well, Mr. Chacon seems to be doing quite well in the robolution as reporter Patricia Poleo published today a letter from milk producer Indulac accepting Arne Chacon's offer of US 10 million for the plants the milk company owns in Machiques and Barquisimeto. How can Mr. Chacon justify his sudden wealth and power? In 2002 he was a lowly employee of the tax office Seniat from where he went to the Banc Industrial de Venezuela, a Government bank, despite having no finance experience of any sort. Well, Mr. Chacon is all of a sudden buying properties right and left with his new found wealth. Onwards the pretty revolution! 7:39:23 PM    comment []

Not sowing the oil by Arturo Uslar Pietri A while back I read for the first time the article by Arturo Uslar Pietri which gave rise to the famous phrase “To sow the oil”. I felt compelled to translate it because of its clarity and foresight. A while later I saw another article by Uslar written reaffirming the validity of that phrase twenty five years later. Today, I found a paid ad in the papers by something called “liderazgoyvision” with an article written by Uslar in 1992. Once again Uslar’s clarity is remarkable and the article seems very timely, as the country revisits the same failed roads of the past. Uslar was a visionary, he said the same thing for seventy years, when will we listen? Not sowing the oil by Arturo Uslar Pietri in Golpe y Estado en Venezuela, Editorial Norma (1992) If recent history shows anything, both in Europe or the Third World, it is the failure of an economic model founded on the utopia that the State can distribute the wealth produced by a nation in a better and more just manner that the simpler and surer ways of the markets. The crumbling down of the soviet bloc, from the powerful Union that seemed to challenge the world, to the satellite states among which there were some of the most educated and capable people of the old continent, this has its basic explanation and foundation on the failure of the state-intervened, directed and controlled economy, in flagrant contrast with the case presented by the developed countries of both the Western world and Asia. While the countries that maintained the essence of a market economy managed to convert themselves into the most prosperous and powerful countries of the world, the countries with Statist economies have failed both economically and politically. Despite the simplicity that the lesson appears to have, there is a lot of resistance to admit it fully and renounce to those abstract promises. While the socialist republics proclaimed the elimination of the private property of the goods of production, the disappearance of social classes and the abundance and well-being for all, in the most happy of equalities, the market economy, which nobody ever invented, nor was it the product of great thoughts from any ideologues, created, by virtue only of its spontaneous correspondence to the psychological mechanisms of human beings, conditioned a prosperity for all, that had never been known before. The truth is that we are not dealing with opposing thesis or contrary ideologies, but of a historical fact, produced in the real circumstances of social life, as is the market, against those that rose in the search for more justice and equality, utopian projects that ended up contradicting human reality. It has become a common place to say that the 80’s turned out to be the lost decade for Latin America and that statement has a lot of truth in it, but it is necessary to make the criteria a little more fine in order not to fall into the simplicity of attributing the failure to possible inferiorities of the inhabitants of the region or geographic or historical fatalities of dubious validity. What has failed is a model for economic policy that was adopted by almost all Latin American countries and that became part of a fundamental program of the parties of the left in the whole region. It was a model that found its basic expression in the policies for the substitution of imports that was proposed at the time by CEPAL and the result of which was to condemn to artificiality and isolation, the economies of each of the countries. What is being proposed today is the difficult and necessary answer to this failure, which is not easy to formulate and carry out going forward because there are too many loyalties cast in favor of the old principles and because, in some way, it has become customary to fall for the dangerous and paralyzing situation of confusing that anti economic policy with the mere notion of nationality and sovereignty. It is going to take a lot of courage, more clairvoyance and a lot of objective effort to opportunely adopt the rectifications and corrections that the circumstances currently require. The case of Venezuela is one of the most pathetic ones in the picture. Everything was given to this country to realize the most complete economic and social development of Latin America. In the inventory of its assets there were a number of advantages: a positive geographical position, a variety of climate and scenery, great natural resources, a then scant population and a growing and well educated leadership that would appear to predict a very rosy future. As basis for all this there was the exceptional and overwhelming presence of an inordinate wealth in gas and oil. From the beginning of the oil price increases, at the end of 1973, for almost fifteen continuous years and due only to the cause of activities related to this resource some 250 billion dollars flowed into this small country. There is no limit to imagine what may have been done with that immense amount of resources in this small population, if there had been realistic and practical criteria to rise, over that base, a prosperous and productive economy and society. Not only was it not done that way, but at the brusque end of that period the country ended up in a more pitiful situation of economic and social inequalities, with an enormous marginal population, with bad public services and with a heavy external debt that lacks any justification. At the bottom of this backwards miracle is the fundamental fact that it was the Venezuelan state which received directly that immense wealth and who distributed it according to the criteria that it was the State, and not society. who should be in charge of executing the social and economic development of the country, turning it into, deliberately, into a parasite of oil wealth, with limited productive capacity of its own with little competitiveness, with ever deficient services, with growing and offensive social inequalities. The rentist state turned the whole country, because of its wrong policies, in a society totally subsidized in all of its forms and with very limited productive capacity of its own. More than half a century ago, when one began to perceive the importance that the oil wealth was going to have in the future of the country, I had the good sense to launch a slogan that could have saved us: “We have to sow the oil”. Unfortunately, it was not sown. The State, evermore powerful and richer, tended to substitute all of the mechanisms for a normal economy to take away from the population the possibility of creating an economy and a modern society and subjected it to a damning dependence on that all powerful and providential state. What needs to be done today, without any possibility of eluding it, is a profound rectification of all those errors, that needs to have as its basis, to reduce the state to its true role and transform, in all of its aspects, the abnormal situation of a society and an economy subsidized onto the stable and sure reality of a productive and developing economy. There are many the things that will need to be changed and will require the will of shared sacrifice, the need to renounce to unsustainable privileges and to put, definitely, all of society to life off its own work and creative effort. For that, we have a favorable possibility, which constitutes at the same time a threatening risk. Venezuela continues to be a country endowed with exceptional resources. Only the value of current proven oil reserves represents an amount close to a trillion dollars, something that few countries can count on. On the basis of these immense resources one could carry out, with the least possible trauma, but with the contribution of the sacrifice of all, the needed transformation, but there also exits the danger that this same notion of wealth lying around will induce us still, irresponsibly, to continue the comfortable and ruinous dependency that has taken us to this tragic situation 12:34:35 AM    comment []