Juan Cristóbal says: Read in an Argentine tourism webpage:"In the vast area where the capybara lives (which spans Panama, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay), it is in the Argentine Republic where you can find the best specimens and the greatest populations."Is it any wonder that, try as we may, Latin Americans are doomed to not get along?
Quico says: In his cadena today, Chávez dropped this bombshell: "When I was 18, I was into show business. I even MC'd a couple of beauty pageants, once with Gilberto Correa and with a super-opposition lady whom I won't mention, we shared a stage. One time, I was on Popy the Clown's show. Remember that show? MCing, incredible. Thank God there's no video of that. But I was on that show MCing a program with Popy."
Quico says: Boy, that was predictable. So, if I'm following this, Venezuela's position now is that its diplomats must remain in Tegucigalpa so they can continue to represent our country's interests to...whom exactly?!?!
Juan Cristóbal says: Teodoro Petkoff is a favorite of Quico's, but I have to bring him to task for today's Tal Cual editorial. Petkoff devotes it to a story about some friends of his who were recently mugged (or maybe they only perceived they were being mugged). Anyway, Teodoro asks Chávez, in an unusually polite manner, to think about the consequences of his violent discourse. This because the muggers, after running off with everything Teodoro's friends had, said,"this is class struggle, and you people are part of the Bourgeoisie."
Quico says: What do you do when a government you don't recognize expels your diplomatic delegation? Come to think of it, given that you didn't recognize them, what was your diplomatic delegation doing in their country in the first place? Shouldn't they have self-expelled themselves as soon as the leader you recognized got tossed out of the country? In fact, if the guy your ambassador presented his credentials to gets deposed, to whom exactly are your diplomats representing your country's interests? And if a country whose government you don't recognize expels your diplomats and you refuse to acknowledge its right to do so, how is that government entitled to react?
Quico says: How else to interpret Chávez's declaration that the stories about FARC funding Rafael Correa's election campaign are "a great falsehood"? After all, it's Mono Jojoy on that video reading Tirofijo's letter explicitly admitting that. So is Chávez's point that Mono Jojoy is lying to his own guerrilleros about what Marulanda wrote? Or that Marulanda was lying to Mono Jojoy (and, by implication also to his fighters) by writing knowing falsehoods to them? Or both?
Juan Cristóbal says: - Alek Boyd sends us this link about Smartmatic's latest "business ventures." It appears our friends with the magical machines have been hired to provide support for the Phillipine elections.
Juan Cristóbal says: - Sounds like a misnomer, right? But there they are, people in the oil industry who stuck it out, did not join the oil strike and now belong to the top echelons of chavista bureaucracy. Who are these people, anyway?
Quico says:In today's NYTimes, Simón Romero has a lovely take on Barinas as Chávez family fiefdom. To wit...In an election last year marred by accusations of fraud, Adán Chávez succeeded his own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a former schoolteacher who had governed Barinas for a decade with the president’s brother, Argenis, the former secretary of state in Barinas. Another brother, Aníbal, is mayor of nearby Sabaneta, and another brother, Adelis, is a top banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does business with Adán’s government. Yet another brother, Narciso, was put in charge of cooperation projects with Cuba. The president’s cousin Asdrúbal holds a top post at the national oil company.
Quico says: Probably the most shocking aspect of the Supreme Tribunal's unceremonial dumping of Judge Alicia Torres is that no laws were even broken in this travesty of justice. As a "provisional judge", Judge Torres had no tenure. She worked "at the pleasure" of TSJ's Judicial Commission, which means it was perfectly legal for the chivos in TSJ to fire her for any reason, or for none at all. Like 80% of lower court judges in Venezuela, Judge Torres had less job security than the janitor who mopped her courtroom's floor at the end of the day. He is protected by Chávez's inamovilidad laboral decrees...she isn't!
Quico says: Reporters Without Borders today warned of the dangers of legal changes announced by the Venezuelan government in the past few weeks with the sole aim of punishing media taking an editorial stance contrary to government aims. Fun quotes after the break...“These legal manoeuvres are supposed to ‘protect the mental health’ of the people. Regulations and laws changed or reinterpreted by a government to impose what it sees as the only possible media truth are just the instruments of an ideological crusade that is already well under way”, it said.
“We urge the government to shelve steps contrary to fundamental constitutional principles and inter-American jurisprudence on freedom of expression.”, it concluded.
Post 27 of 100. Quick, somebody give the man who invented cut-and-paste a prize.
Quico says: Human Rights Defender Gabriela Ramírez's speech to the effect that what's really out of control in Venezuela is the perception of crime fits the classic definition of a gaffe: an inadvertent expression of an impolitic truth. Maddening as it is to hear an official say something like that, Ramírez's opinion is actually borne out by more evidence than you might think. Indeed, over the last 10 years, there's been a clearly growing gap between people's perception of insecurity and their reports on how often they - or their immediate families are - victimized.
Marta says: "What kind of 'New Man' are they talking about? Ché Guevara is their model, by God!"
Juan Cristóbal says: - The attached press note from a speech given by People's Ombuds-person Gabriela Ramírez says a lot about why our country is mired in an unprecedented crime wave. It also speaks volumes about the priorities chavista bureaucrats place on publicity and advertising above all else.
Quico says: Has anyone else noticed the way the runaway success of Noticias24 has spawned this whole ecosystem of copy-cat sites on the Venezuelan internet? Minuto59 is just one of the bunch: people who saw that, "wait a minute, these N24 folk must be making a ton of money freeloading off of other people's work...we want in on that game!" What could be more Venezuelan? By which I mean what could be sadder, lazier, and less creative?
La Paz, Bolivia - 11:04 a.m.
Juan Cristóbal says: - File this under "important stories we are not paying enough attention to:" the government's efforts aimed at finding partners to develop the Carabobo Block in the Orinoco heavy-oil producing region are hitting some serious roadblocks.
Juan Cristóbal says: - Today I read about two eye-popping trends. The first - McDonald's is reporting that sales in Venezuela are increasing, despite the country's dramatic shift to socialism and the evident slowdown in the economy. This is not surprising - the passion Venezuelans have for McD's was the muse for one of my favorite posts. But it underscores the disconnect between the political discourse of those in power and people's priorities on the street.
Juan Cristóbal says: - There was a high-profile meeting today at OAS eadquarters in Washington between OAS diplomats and Antonio Ledezma, Pablo Pérez and César Pérez Vivas. The absence of Henrique Capriles Radonski did not go unnoticed, and several journalists in Venezuela have questioned the Miranda governor's motives. Wondering what the real story was, I called up my sources close to the Governor, and here is what I found out.
Juan Cristóbal says: - Several readers have chastised me for using sexist language in two of my stream-of-consciousness posts today. I called Cilia Flores a whore and I also called Luisa Estella Morales hormonal and menopausal, and it was probably unnecessary (I've fixed the language on both posts to avoid further offense). I apologize for that. I live as the lone male with five women, so I'm no sexist - I'm a slave to women! Still, the comments were juvenile, petty and sexist and readers were right in calling me for it. And yet...
Quico says: I close day one with a newfound appreciation for the high-volume blogger's craft. I simply blogged as much as my imagination could sustain, with a friend's help, and still didn't hit my 20 post quota for the day. The thought that this guy Sullivan's been doing this, day in and day out, for 10 years, is just staggering.
Quico says: So, a little over a year ago, I wrote this epic post about going to get my driver's license in Caracas. In this blog's seven year history, it's one of the posts I'm proudest of: I just think it captured something special about both the glories and the miseries of Venezuelanity. Alas, last week I had to go trade in that hard-earned Venezuelan license for a new one so I can drive here, so I thought the time was ripe for a bit of compare and contrast. Because the contrast really couldn't be more complete: Quebec's provincial bureaucracy operates with simply bone-chilling efficiency, minimizing both your aggravation and the chance to make real human connections with the people you share the experience with.
Juan Cristóbal says: - As some of you may know, I finally caved and began using twitter a few weeks ago. (Insert shameless self-promotion here ) Venezuelan politicians also seem to be catching on ... slowwwwwly. Whether you think this is a feature or a bug, it can't hurt to know who's doing it. The only ones I have are people in PJ. My list is after the jump.
Quico says: As we see OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza increasingly mimetized with Chávez over the Honduran crisis, it's worth remembering that the organization the guy leads can't even get an invite to Venezuela when the topic is human rights. Amazing though it is to think about now, the human rights arm of OAS (the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR) spent much of 2006 and 2007 trying, to no avail, to set up an official visit to Venezuela to monitor the Human Right situation there.227. During 2007, the Commission dedicated much of its time in trying to materialize a visit to Venezuela. Those efforts have been frustrated by the State’s silence on the question of a firm date for the visit. Since the Commission’s in loco visit to Venezuela in 2002, the Venezuelan Government has said that it would like the Commission to conduct follow-up activities, or arrange a visit by the Rapporteur for Venezuelan affairs, Dr. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, to get a firsthand look at the changes that the State has introduced through the Missions and the Prison System Humanization Plan, among other initiatives. Thus far, however, the Commission has seen no progress on these fronts.This bizarre situation is made all the stranger by the fact that, virtually alone in the world, Venezuela's constitution (Art. 23) actually gives international human rights treaties constitutional rank, explicitly saying they take precedence over internal legislation and can be directly enforced by the nation's courts! But then, the whole constitution-cum-toilet-paper theme has been sufficiently developed here (and elsewhere) that it's not really worth belaboring anymore.
228. Furthermore, in early 2007, the Rapporteur for Venezuelan Affairs drew up a tentative agenda for a visit to Venezuela, which was discussed with the Permanent Representative of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the Organization of American States (OAS). In addition, several meetings between the President of the Commission and other members of the Commission with the same Ambassador were held in order discuss the achievement of a visit to the country. The President of the IACHR and the Rapporteur for Venezuela met the Minister and Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs in order to directly discuss the visit, having sent a letter to the Government proposing specific dates for December 2007 to which the Government of Venezuela has not yet responded.
Quico says: It's hard to overstate how bizarre the judicial persecution against Globovision financier and president Guillermo Zuloaga's had already gotten even before the judge put in charge of the case, Alicia Torres, got sacked today. Over the weekend, Judge Torres came under so much pressure to sign an order banning the man from leaving the country, she ended up in hospital, with heightened blood pressure and a recipe for the obligatory Lexotanil - Venezuela's cheap-and-cheerful tropical knock-off version of Valium.
"Well Vanessa, maybe if you knew me from before - like others who know me, right Eligio (Rojas)? (You would know) it's dangerous to mess with me because I'm also like the spine tree that blooms in the savannah. You don't know me well, but check."Morales was referring to a popular saying in the Venezuelan plains. It references the spine tree, which blooms in the savannah, "gives off a nice aroma to passersby, but thorns those that shake it." This saying has been used by Hugo Chávez on numerous occasions.
Juan Cristóbal says: - Life in our fair, not-quite-socialist capital city is highlighted in a NY Times piece by Simón Romero and Gregory Kristof, only not in the "World/Americas" section but rather in the Economix blog. Check it out.Walk into the San Lorenzo supermarket in Caracas, for instance, and a box of Fruit Loops costs the equivalent of $54 at the official exchange rate, which Mercer used in its study. A bag of Uncle Ben’s long grain rice costs $80, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey $98, and so on.There you have it, Venezuela in a nutshell: a box of rice costs a little less than a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and about 100 times what it costs to fill up your gas tank.
Quico says: Lets say that, as the ALBA block claims to believe, the interruption of constitutional rule in Honduras is simply unacceptable and Zelaya has to be restored as head of state post-haste. As soon as he's reinstated, he'll find himself once again facing a congress overwhelmingly - indeed, unanimously - opposed to his brand of leadership, and one whose claim to legitimacy rests on the same votes his claim rests on. After weeks of breathlessly demonizing those congressional leaders as goriletti's fascist goons, what are the chances that Zelaya would suddenly acceed to come back and recognize the legal role accorded to them in the constitution?
Quico says: Child rapist Daniel Ortega (a.k.a. the president of Nicaragua) has apparently decided that Central America isn't quite tense and unstable enough as it is. Fresh from rigging municipal elections last year, Ortega has just called for the Nicaraguan constitution to be reformed so that he can - wait for it - stand for re-election.
Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to send in pictures. I'll be publishing them at the rate of one per day this week, so do hang tight.
Juan Cristóbal says: Rumors of a not-quite-overt devaluation of Venezuela's fixed exchange rate system continue to swirl. The last few months, there have been suggestions that Cadivi, Venezuela's fixed exchange-rate currency rationing body, was going to transfer some of its sales capacity to the Central Bank. The idea was to allow the Central Bank to sell the dollars banks and stock brokers needed (yes, they're still around) through an auction. The plan, which would create a third exchange market with a higher price than the fixed rate but at a lower price than the parallel market, appears to be on the verge of being implemented.
Quico says: It really is a masterpiece of Ionesco-ish Latin American political lunacy: Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa responded to the video of FARC's now top-ranking commander, Mono Jojoy, reading a letter by recently deceased FARC leader Manuel Marulanda by blaming a vast-right-wing-conspiracy for the whole thing, and asking Alvaro Uribe to take a lie detector test to see who's involved with what group in Colombia. Brilliant!
Quico says: Bloomberg has an excellent piece on the scale of the fiscal sink hole the government is in these days. Facing a budget deficit worth as much as 7% of GDP, the government is hitting up Venezuela's banks hard, borrowing more and more of the bolivars you put into your bank account. At last count, the commercial banks' domestic currency holdings had risen over 50% from last year, to Bs.88 billion. The upshot of all this? Morgan Stanley expects the economy to contract by 5% this year.
Quico says: Killer fact: 17% of all the cocaine produced in the Andes moves through Venezuela, now that the volume of coke trafficked through the country has risen four-fold from 2004 levels. That and other tidbits in the widely-leaked US congressional report on Venezuela-as-narcohub are scary enough in their own right, but only take on their full, macabre dimension when seen alongside late FARC leader Manuel Marulanda's deathbed letter to his guerrillas. In it, Tirofijo speaks repeatedly, matter-of-factly and in some detail about FARC's close and vital ties to the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, often mimicking chavista rhetoric and stressing again and again his trust in and affection for "el amigo" - as he typically refers to Chávez.
Quico says: Mel Zelaya's grandiloquent announcement yesterday that he intends to now lead an "insurrection" in Honduras as he walked out of the US-backed mediation effort in Costa Rica might be just hot air, but it might also be the start of a terrible human tragedy. In the end, it was too much to hope for, thinking Chávez would allow the US the propaganda triumph of having the Arias mediation mission succeed.
Quico says: What follows over the next few days is an experiment: a shot at re-imagining what Caracas Chronicles might be like under a different, more Andrew Sullivanesque publishing schedule. Going Sullivan would entail more or less reversing the way I typically do business. Normally, I read through the papers looking for one or two interesting stories I might write something substantive about, and launch into it. If you've ever read Sullivan's amazing blog you know he stands that model more or less on its head, writing just a note or two about almost everything even marginally interesting he reads online.
Quico and Juan Cristóbal say: So, we've just noticed there are now 1900 posts in this blog's 7 year archive...now that we're so close to the 2000 mark, we thought, "why not shake things up around here a bit?" So, next week, we're going to be trying a bit of an experiment on Caracas Chronicles:
Quico says: So over the last few days readers have been complaining, both in the comments section and over email, that we never wrote anything about Metropolitan Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma's hunger strike at the OAS office in Caracas.
Quico says: What a long, strange trip this Honduran coup has been. It takes a crisis of this magnitude to reconfigure the hemisphere's idea of itself, to cast players in new roles or, rather, to recognize players in the roles they've been playing, quietly, for some time.With images of tanks and soldiers bringing back old memories and passions, it's costly to say that what really happened in Honduras is that they put a stop to Chávez's meddling. The illegality with which Honduran politicos and military men acted attests to that country's incomplete democratic transition, but make no mistake about it: Honduras is the victim, Chávez is the culprit, and Zelaya is a poor ingenue who was used to create this conflict.It's still far from clear how the Honduran crisis is going to play out in the end and - to my mind, much more importantly - what collective lessons Latin America will learn from it. But Villalobos puts his finger on one way Latin America will clearly be different after the crisis than it was before: Chávez's determination to impose his understanding of legitimacy can no longer be doubted. The systematic nature of the threat to hemispheric stability he poses can no longer be softballed.
When the Colombian military crossed the border and went into Ecuador last year, the situation was similar: Colombia was the victim, the most strategic of FARC's camps was on Ecuadorean territory, and the formal sin was to violate another country's territory.
Recently, Peru suffered more than 20 casualties, most of them cops, in a conflict with indigenous people; chavista meddling was also a factor in that occasion. To that we can add the suitcase full of cash in Argentina, the support for Ollanta Humala in Perú, as well as for the Colombian FARC and the Salvadorean FMLN.
Without Chávez's money, Daniel Ortega would not have been able to commit electoral fraud in Nicaragua.
In the 60s, 70s and 80s, Cuba took on a policy of supporting insurgencies that fought dictatorships, as part of its strategic defense against US attacks. Chávez, on the other hand, destabilizes democracies even though nobody is attacking Venezuela, there is no blockade, there are no contras, no assassinations, and the US remains his number one oil buyer.
Chávez, Ortega and Correa's role in attempts to bring back Zelaya to Honduras are part of a policy to govern outward, creating or worsening others' conflicts rather than solving the problems in one's own countries. The use of the Venezuelan state owned network Telesur to coordinate "diplomacy" with street brawling, the involvement of Venezuelan planes and pilots, the calls for rebellion, all these speak for themselves: Chávez needs dead hondurans.
The upshot is that, whether we like it or not, internationally isolating the Honduran government increases the risk of violence.
What we need now is a policy of mediation to aid the reconciliation between Hondurans, not supposedly diplomatic initiatives that actually escalate the confrontation. We need to persuade, not impose and, most importantly, we need to look at the entire problem and not just this coup.
It may be that the Honduran problem can be resolved through negotiations, but it's only a matter of time until Chávez provokes another conflict somewhere else and perhaps another government will decide to stop him using methods that break the law, as Colombia and Honduras have already done. But the international community can hardly demand that Honduras reinstate Zelaya if it won't do anything about the fraud Ortega committed in Nicaragua or lift a finger to put a stop to Chavez's interventionism.
Quico says: Be sure to check out this fascinating column on the Honduran crisis by IAD's Michael Lisman in, of all places, The Guardian:As Honduras enters its second week of political crisis, the international community is beginning to take a second look at the murky circumstances under which the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was removed from office and exiled from the country on June 28.One of the most interesting things about this Honduran crisis is the way chavismo's rhetorical crouch - together with the US's colossal rabo'e'paja when it comes to military coups - have conspired to make it strictly verboten for regional leaders to say, out loud, thigs that a-they obviously think and b-are central to the crisis.
Until last weekend, world leaders were unanimous in their condemnation of the so-called military coup. But having been forced to watch the spectacle continue for a second straight week, the world has now become painfully aware of two things they had not anticipated.
The first is how ardent, unanimous, and organized the interim government in Honduras is against any sort of reprieve for Zelaya, much less his reinstatement.
The second is how erratic and unfit for leadership Zelaya has become. Both realisations have caused diplomats to rethink their strategies in the push for Zelaya's immediate and unrestricted return to power. As the standoff continues this week, the international community would be wise to bite its tongue and instead, push for what world leaders initially called a "Honduran solution" – even if it's not the one they had in mind.
Juan Cristóbal says: - Sometimes, bloggers make mistakes.
