Back to the XIX century

Regular readers may remember that often I wrote that chavismo was a mere reactionary movement, harking back to an ideal time of macho caudillos and independence wars. That violence and poverty ruled over Venezuela from 1805 until Gomez established the first stable regime of our history is apparently not an historical fact that chavistas can be bothered with: all that is wrong in Venezuela comes exclusively from the 1958-98 period and the evil empire up North.

Well, chavismo should be delighted because we are getting back to these halcyon days of robber barons (cheap ones, not rich ones as in the US) and grinding poverty. Four items to frighten you.


No tests

My brother went to get his normal blood work before his annual date with his cardiologue. What was his surprise that this huge private clinic, very well known, could not test for hemoglobin (nor three other items of the 20 that include that test).

My SO, also this week, needs a test for the marker of his disease. I had to spend three hours to find finally a lab that could still perform that test.

I suppose that if there are no tests for diseases then there will be no disease and like in the XIX century we shall rely some herbal stuff for pretty much any ailment. I watched in horror the other day as a show on public TV had a kid vaunting herbal medicine saying it was a way for us to "free ourselves from the negative influence of the traditional scientific capitalist medicine".  There you go: got cancer, get a plaster of gamelote on your ulcer. Traditional science, whatever that moronic oxymoron may mean, is bogus, what our ancestors did more than a century ago is the way to go.

Robbing animal feed

As I have reported before the situation in battery raised livestock, representing 80% of the protein consumed of Venezuela is going down hill because the regime monopole on grain import and distribution is not working. Note: organic food is the privilege of the very, very rich in Venezuela. Well, now this scarcity is made worse by the increasing robberies in animal feed plants. A customer told me that there are gangs now that break in the storage aras of animal feed plants to steal vitamins, amino acids, antiobiotics, etc...  They can steal trucks of stuff and curiously, in spite of the multiple check points held by the Nazional Guard on all Venezuelan rodas, these trucks never seem to be inspected, and even less stopped. Imagine that!?

Thus we are back tot he XIX except that cattle stealing has been replaced by feed stealing, with the same impunity as before when the local caudillo helped himself to whatever it needed and that was that. The caudillos have been replaced by caudillos in military uniform as this type of robbery can only take place with support from the people inside the army, be it drug traffic or feed traffic. Needless to say that such robberies may cause feed plants to be stopped for days.  Too bad for the animals counting on that. And further scarcity on markets.

Squatters rights

Apparently now consejos comunales, that ersatz local power soviet invented by Chavez for political control and patronage, have the right to seize any property that they deem under occupied.

A friend of mine has a small week end farm in Carabobo. For a variety of reasons, insecurity being one, he has stopped visiting it with the frequency he used to. Still, he or a relative or someone goes at least once a month to aerate the house, pick up the garbage, etc so the place does not look abandoned. That is not enough, he has to sell it now because he has been informed that the local consejo comunal has an eye on it even though his neighbors are defending him, that he has all property rights, all taxes paid, etc. never mind that the neighbors are scared about what lumpen would the consejo install there, probably the real reason why they defend my friend against the consejo... Note that the existence of a consejo in an area by itself make property lose up to half its value in the area as a consejo can butt in on anything they want.

We are just back to the XIX century when a torn down village during one of our numerous civil wars was simply occupied by a group of people because, well, it was abandoned. That was no expropriation or agrarian reform, it was just a "look, there is no one there, let's move in" moment.

I would like to note that if the regime was indeed building ALL THE HOUSING it claims to be inaugurating, why would any consejo comunal have the need to steal somebody else property? But I suppose that I am digressing, that I do not understand that such things are done for the good of el pueblo.

Your local pig

When I was a child, and we went on the adventure tourism that Venezuela was then in the 60ies and 70ies, small villages had pigs used as garbage disposal units. That is right, villagers would bring their garbage to a dump at the outskirts and a couple of pigs would come regularly to forage. Eventually those pigs were killed and eaten or sold on the road side surrounded by a significant amount of flies. That was, well, the only source of meat sometimes. Fortunately by the 80ies animal farms and sanitary controls and distribution chains and refrigerated facilites had set and thus Venezuelans could buy fresh or frozen meats prepared with all the desired hygienic standards.

This is over. With food scarcity and creeping poverty not only backyard chickens are back but your foraging pig is making a return. Well, not quite as the pig can now be stolen so you better lock it up....  So in the country side some are now having a pig or two in their back yards.

Why would that be wrong, you may ask? Well, the veterinarian and health official support for such activity does not exist anymore in Venezuela. That is, the pigs raised this way will have no veterinary supervision even if the owner could afford it anyway. And there is very little medicine available for livestock, by the way.

That new backyard livestock activity increases dramatically the probability to revive parasitic diseases due to the proximity of animals, without counting on well known plagues like the flu associated with apartment raising chickens in China.

There also we are enjoying a return of the halcyon unsanitary days of yesteryear.

That is chavista progress for you.

In Snowden less news: murder of a fireman and nationalization of Venezuelan medicine

As if the regime hadn't enough fronts open, it has decided to control the prices of the medical services offered by private clinics. And the insurance companies promptly approved saying that they will only honor the nominal prices. And yet this only hides the deep failure of the health system that the regime started to improvise for electoral purposes since 2003. The public system being such a failure, everyone tries desperately to get a private insurance so as to go to private clinics that work much better than the public sector even though much is to be criticized with them. The regime is upset and shoots the messenger, by bankrupting this one. It is that simple.

Controlling prices of private clinics in Venezuela at this point is an absurd. They are overworked. They are underpaid. Insurances companies, in particular the ones associated with the government public employees delay their considerable payments, if they even honor them (which has pushed many clinics on the verge of bankruptcy to suspend certain insurers and their patients, until the bill is paid). The result is that now private sector clinics look more and more like public hospitals used to look a few years ago, before Chavez was elected first.

In addition a high inflation and a scarcity of imports have hampered the daily operations. For example among the restricted imports there are plenty of medical kits and medicines. We learned, to pick one, that analytic labs, upon which most diagnostics depend, are working at half speed. Even basics, such as needles and the specific test tubes to collect blood samples for the different analysis are hard to come by.

The public sector is even worse. Hospitals are full of people in line because, simply put, they are waiting for hours, days and even weeks, for a doctor to show up or for an O.R. to open, or a machine to be fixed for a diagnostic. If the private clinics are overcrowded with people that are willing to bankrupt themselves it is because these people know quite well that if they wait for a putative turn at some hospital they probably die in the wait or reach the doctor much sicker than when they arrived.

Such a situation has broken down any ethic in the medical sector, from private clinics refusing to attend emergencies of the uninsured, to public hospitals with absentee personnel, when they are not satisfying themselves by sitting down with the patients because they do not even have what is needed for attending the most basic emergencies.

The latest scandal was the death this week of Caracas Firemen chief who had an accident on his motor bike, and was then taken to a private clinic but whose insurance did not approve entry!  Yes, the Caracas public fireman was on a private insurance. When that happened his relatives and friends had no other choice but to take him to a state hospital. They had the poor guy wait for several hours until they finally an O.R. was available. But it was too little and too late and the guy died in the elevator on the way to the O.R.

Reading the full account of the story can only bring tears to your eyes. Caracas firemen who should be heroes like it happens in other country are without "ambulances, nor insurance or paychecks".

The clinic, not to excuse them at all, rejected the victim. The reason was that the insurance did not clear because the government did a bad paper work job at switching the insurance companies, when putting the firemen of Caracas under a new insurance that covered them less, a ridiculous amount I would dare to say considering how dangerous is the firemen work. Not only that, but we read that the new insurance would be allowed to use some of the workers benefit to pay extensive bills, something that is illegal in the labor law of Venezuela so proudly dictated by Chavez for his reelection. But in a fascist regime such subtleties are simply ignored.

The victim could not be taken speedily to any health center because 54 out of 60 of the fire station ambulances are out of order. 54!

Of course, the regime has started "investigating" the clinic that refused service while Caracas mayor office went to close it finding a whole bunch of irregularities that his office should have detected years ago!!!!! And suddenly a long sleeping law on firemen service has been dusted off and sent in rush to the Nazional Assembly floor. No word on whether the public hospital delay of 6 hours to attend the victim will be investigated.

Can you expect anything good from that?

The hypocrisy of the regime on the health system debacle is simply staggering. The new health minister, Isabel Iturria, is a mere hack, maybe a true criminal, spending her time attacking the private sector of medicine to hide the colossal failure of the public sector that she inherited two months ago from another criminal, Eugenia Sader. While at the same time fudging statistics to hide the real number of AH1N1 cases and deaths in the country. After all official statistics in Venezuela, reported merrily by international organizations that cannot be bothered in checking them, aim to make the world believe that this hell is paradise. Paradise lost, indeed!

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Added later: I realize that a casual reader may not know how the Venezuelan health care system works.

The public sector, the one where supposedly health care is free, includes two systems. The old one composed of public hospitals and "dispensarios" created before Chavez and never probably taken care of under Chavez, unless it is a hospital that his administration built or rebuilt, a tiny minority in spite of all the propaganda. And the parallel health system, created starting 2003 under Cuban directives. This one includes the famous to now infamous Barrio Adentro and the CDI which are mini hospitals of sorts. Corruption ridden this parallel system is simply unmanageable, contradicts too often the hospital system and is for all practical purposes working at half speed these days with maybe as much as half of the small Barrio Adentro modules closed. The public hospital system is so neglected that patients are routinely asked to bring even the bed sheets for the patients, and to have a relative spend the night so that the patient is not robbed of his medicine, food and health items (the fireman of the tale above was stolen of his belongings while he was laying on the pavement in the wait for an ambulance). Often surgeries are performed only after the patient ha provided a certain numbers of items from gauze to medication.

The private health sector in Venezuela range from small hospitals to major facilities but are all called "clinicas" or some related term, as the word hospital is reserved for the public sector.  It benefited of a steady grow and the best doctors until Chavez came to office. Since then many, too many of the brightest have emigrated. Meanwhile the developing insurance sector, propelled by by the willingness of people to fork big money to access proper heath care denied to them at public facilities has made the private sector which has stopped building major facilities, go from a resort like atmosphere in the 90ies to a crowded, noisy, even dirty public hospital feel of the same 90ies. Yet, the care dispensed there is sought, willing paid and still manages a decent quality considering all the impediments experienced. Refusal of care at emergency is still rather an exception than the rule though in smaller centers like the one the fireman was taken too it seems that such experiences are not unusual for the simple reason that they have no means, that all their emergency beds are taken all the time.