My country has become a scare tactic... How embarrassing. In the final few days before the Brazilian presidential election, the doomed r...

This riot is brought to you by...your government! It's hard to contain the seething anger I feel when watching the TV footage from y...

Anatomy of (yet another) downtown riot … (sigh…these are getting predictable…) At first, people weren’t sure what to make of the protes...

[it occurs to me that, especially for non-Venezuelans, the column above might not make that much sense without an…] Explicative note on h...

Yes, yes, I've been delinquent about posting. In my defense, I've been battling a dreadful cold and sinking under a pile of work. ...

7 kilometers, packed solid... I'm just about to step outside and go march, but one last update: it's huge. My boss just called...

World Mental-Health Day An inside story in El Nacional tells us it's World Mental-Health Day today. How apropos. Mental health is no...

The Revolt of Los Palos Grandes Last night was a circus. First, Rosendo Struck Again. Major General Manuel Rosendo, in full military u...

Ineffectual authoritarianism… What a farce! The TV images from the joint Secret Police/Military Intelligence raid of Colonel Antonio Gue...

The rumor mill on overdrive... Well, Ana and Pedro, if you read this from Rome, I hate to alarm you but Caracas was spooky today. The ru...

Closer and closer to the edge… Soldiers in the metro, soldiers at the big east-side shopping mall (the Sambil), soldiers downtown. Tan...

"This can't last: it's too stupid." Caracas can't be said to have the most vibrant intellectual life in Latin Amer...

"Today, we aborted a coup..." If Enrique Tejera-Paris is the best the opposition can come up with for a coupster, man, we...

"Gaviria Go Home!" More coup rumors today. My colleague has gotten three different anguished phone calls from friends who'...

Is the glass two-thirds full... ...or one-third empty? As Cesar Miguel Rondón - Venezuela's fat, balding version of Larry King - kep...

not sure how happy my boss will be if he sees I've posted VenEconomy's subscription-only editorial on this free website, but christ...

“They’d told me what made Venezuela tick was oil… …but now that I get here, I see that what the country really runs on is rumors.” It...

Tic tac tic tac tic tac… Luis Alcalá was leaving his house to go pick up his eight year old kid from school. The man he’d seen scoping o...

"Please crush our movement, sir." The thing about these "Security Zones" is that by decreeing them, the government s...

"We've reached the breaking point and nothing is improbable." It's a scary thought. But it's much much scarier as ...

Reinventing the hyperinflation wheel Probably the hardest part of my job is writing about monetary and fiscal policy, impossibly technic...

Correction... The previous post wrongly reported that the La Carlota security zone includes Francisco de Miranda Avenue and the Plaza Al...

Security zones? OK…but for whose security? Another Monday, another feverish political row in Caracas. This week, the hot issue is the de...

Notes on a civil war that may or may not happen... How tense is Venezuela these days? It's an odd, difficult question. If you go by ...

Billowing clouds of tear gas... It hardly came as a surprise. After some not very fruitful attempts at on-site mediation, the National G...