Chávez siempre fue un reaccionario

Siempre pensé que la seudo revolución bolivariana era en el fondo un movimiento reaccionario. No me esperaba encontrar en el aeropuerto de Valencia una prueba clara y sencilla.

Reza esa propaganda, abusiva, en el área de registro del aeropuerto de Valencia, por si no lo leen claro:

"Tenemos que terminar

de borrar las formulas extrañas

a nosotros mismos y buscar

los códigos de nuestro

pensamiento más antiguo".

Nada mas elocuente para definir lo reaccionario de la mente de Hugo Chávez, y lo anacrónico de la embustera revolución bolivariana que ha terminado, por supuesto, en un desastre de corrupción, ineptitud e inmoralidad profunda. Con bases ideológicas como la frase citada, ¿que se podía esperar?

Podríamos escribir tratados sobre tan tamaña babosidad o cursileria como prefiera usted calificarlo. Podríamos imaginar la mente del responsable que escogió esa frase del "gigante" en vez de otra algo menos ridícula. Podríamos preocuparnos que muchos piensen que en verdad eso fue un pensamiento profundo, digno de presentarse a cualquier viajero que embarca en el aeropuerto Santos Michelena de Valencia (si es que no le cambian el nombre algún día por algo menos elitesco, mas revolucionario).  Pero mas bien no, vayamos al grano.

Primero, que es eso de "nuestro pensamiento mas antiguo". ¿El de los indios en guayuco que desconocían la escritura? ¿Tenían los mismos "códigos" los Cumanagotos, los Caracas, los Timotocuicas?

¿Y que se entiende por códigos? ¿Eran las sociedades pre colombinas sociedades de códigos rígidos como los quiso implantar Chávez?

¿Cuales son las "formulas extrañas a nosotros mismos"? ¿Las de los esclavos importando cultos africanos? ?¿Los españoles y su Inquisición que tanto quisiera repetir la revolución fea? ¿Marxismo, capitalismo, democracia, caudillismo, federalismo, liberalismo amarillo o del color que sea? ¿Quien decide?

"Terminar de borrar". ¿O sea el tipo ya decidió por su cuenta empezar a borrar lo que le conviene borrar? Claro esta, ya sabemos que Hugo estaba en eso, que paso bastante tiempo reescribiendo la historia de Venezuela. Lo que leemos hoy es una confesión de parte de que hay que borrar los hechos que no gustan. Así, sin discusión, cuando se le ocurría.

Lo que Chávez siempre quiso fue volver al pasado, no el de los indígenas, no el de los conquistadores, no el de los esclavos, no el de la colonia, ni siquiera el de la independencia que también trato de apropiarse al no poder repetirlo, y menos de entenderlo. Hugo quería volver al pasado de los caudillos, donde el, jefe de una montonera del siglo XIX, fuese capaz de hacerse del poder, guardárselo y convencer que a la gente que el era lo mejor, que había que quererlo, aunque sea a planazos.

Chávez fue un reaccionario de lo peor que pasó en nuestra historia. Todos los "códigos" que ha querido borrar son los que han hecho el país, para que volvamos a ser una comarca de esclavos consintientes del caudillo.

On m'élit roi, mon peuple m'aime.

Waiting for your bags in Valencia

I am back home and I wanted to finish my little chronicles of a holiday that was not.


I witnessed prices changing within 48 hours, in particular on booze, some of it going up 30% between two visits. I witnessed a huge line forming within minutes of the arrival of milk at Sigo, one of the main grocery stores at Pampatar. I saw beggars and other victims when one is supposed that there are plenty of "misiones" to take care of these poor wretches. I endured traffic jams like I have to suffer in Caracas or Valencia. Well, not as bad but way too bad for what is after all a small island. Everywhere potholes, dirt, anarchy. I had to live through hotel rooms barely cleaned, with wash hands and showers with poor drainage. No wonder that the only tourists still seen in Margarita, besides the Venezuelans that cannot go anywhere else are a multilatin chusma crowd. Hard cash tourists nowhere to be seen.

To top it off, on my return to Valencia the huge posters of the baggage claim section reminded us clearly who is responsible for that clogged sinkhole Venezuela has become.  I am leaving you with the pictures of "The Giant", Hugo Chavez, the destroyer of the country harassing us even after his death....

I felt  under surveillance.....

Maduro in little, Chavez in big.....

To understand how degraded Venezuela is, travel by plane....

Registration under Chavez

I left for a short holiday to Margarita and truly, it is an awesome experience. Not for the adventure, good food, beautiful scenery, but for the lousy service, the degraded infrastructure, the lack of basic items such as milk....  So there, a little summary.

It all started with the difficulty in finding a plane ticket. In Venezuela now, if you want to have a choice of travel dates, you need to buy a month ahead, even in low season, which is my case. By trying to get my ticket with barely three weeks notice, I could not find the adequate dates and I lost one day of my "package" while having to pay the full price anyway.  Not to mention the aggravation of useless web pages of Venezuelan airline companies which forced me in the end to go to an agency....

Proof that Chavez was a reactionary

But I got my ticket and on the set day I went to Valencia to take my flight.  To decorate this entry I have a collection of the airport political propaganda that I had to endure while at the airport: I had to be there two hours earlier to make sure I would not be bumped for a "waiting list" and my flight was 1 hour and a half late without any explanation. Click the pictures to enlarge for details.


The wait was made heavy because there is no relief from propaganda.  Everywhere, from the registration desk to the bathroom entry there is some large expensive poster with Chavez, Chavez thoughts, Chavez battalion uniform, and one, for Maduro and his 12 step program....

gate entertainment

Waiting at the gate

I was asked to go through security at the accorded time. So the wait was at the gate area, boring, drab, announcing a WiFi that did not work, with a TV screen stuck on VTV, the state propaganda network. The program went back and forth between the only worthy news of the day for the regime, which was an electoral rehearsal for next December, and old speeches of Chavez that are broadcast all the time..... Fortunately the sound was set so low that the AC noise was enough to cover the TV noise.

Eventually, my flight arrived. The last passenger had barely descended the plane that we started boarding. Meaning? There was no time to clean the plane or its toilets. So I tried not to look where I sat and certainly did not even consider going to the john...

Maduro's 12 step....

When you arrive in Margarita you check as if you were arriving to some international airport immigration: you need to have your finger print taken and show your national ID. Supposedly it is to check for eventual delinquents and protect tourists and avoid drug trafficking. But delinquents can rent a boat on mainland and in barely one hour can land discretely in Margarita...  Never mind that in Caracas airport it is not that difficult to hide 1.3 tons of cocaine in regular scheduled international flights. Thus having my finger print taken was not reassuring whatsoever, just another waste of time (you have to stand in line), just another aggravation.

Anyway, I got into my taxi on my way to the hotel. I confirmed my observations from my last visits: taxis are getting jalopier by the day. The lack of spare parts is taking its toll and in one of the several taxis I took I was wondering how long it would take for the motor to explode....

Chavez waits for you on the
way to the rest rooms

The usual hotel I stay in keeps degrading. Now they do not even bother taking your credit card voucher for expenses if you do not take the package. Either you take the full package or you pay as you go.  Too many people bailing out of their bills.  With the end of luxury tourism in Margarita  now we get cheap mass tourism service whether we have the means to indulge on occasional fake luxury. Let's not forget that luxury tourism is the tax source to pay for services for all type of concurring tourism activities: you are not going to pay for beautifying Margarita with the tax income from youth hostels. Luxury, and even not so luxury tourism is gone from Margarita because of insecurity, lack of amenities, degradation of the free trade zone, extinction of casinos, dirt, ill service, etc...  People have much better places to go than Margarita where to spend their hard earned tourism dollars.

Chavez battalion hymn,
gate entrance....

Next day I hit the beach. The upkeep is lousy.  Until last year there was some effort to pick up the garbage that comes drifting, or left shamelessly by visitors. Whether they are still doing it, they have got less efficient at it.

I think I'll stop before I get bitter and I ruin my last hours...  But there are reasons as to why tourism is degrading so much, besides being forced to contemplate for hours propaganda in waiting rooms. For example let me tell you why air travel is so bad now.

For years the regime has refused to give enough dollars to the airline companies to buy planes and spare parts. At the same time it blocks ticket prices and does not provide adequately for airport services.  With time airlines have to cut down on service, jam their airplanes with fixed prices fares so that at least they manage to stay even, at best. I fear to think about the security of these planes....

And Izarra, the tourism minister, former propaganda minister, claims that if there are not many tourists coming to Venezuela, it is due to people like me writing ill of Venezuelan conditions. Yeah, right.....

PS: reading the paper I find out that Giusti had a much harder a time at Caracas airport to go to Margarita than I had travelling from Valencia....

The IAEPHC is born. We may finally start understanding something of the twisted mind of Chavez

Hefty, hefty.....

In the "you cannot make up such shit" section, today Maduro signed the decree to open the Instituto de Altos Estudios del Pensamiento de Hugo Chávez, or for you Spanish speaking impaired people, The Institute for Higher Studies of the Thoughts of Hugo Chavez. And no one else but his older brother could be fit enough to direct it.

Let's start by saying that the work is going to be epic. Not because Hugo Chavez left a body of work worth analyzing but because he did not leave anything written except for a few newspaper columns and some letters. What Chavez is leaving are hours and hours and yet more hours of rants. Though "rant" is not a good description of Chavez speeches, the French "déblatérer" would be better, describing abundant and violent speech against something. But I digress.

Yet, the thousand of hours of Chavez speeches are not necessarily the main hurdle for the august work of such a novel institute. First, the profound thinkers that are to study Chavez opus will have to sift through insults, vulgarity and parables to find some substance. And yet, it is not going to be all. Across his entire career Chavez has contradicted himself constantly though admittedly after 2006 he took a more steady course towards a communist approach more in accordance with the way he gave up the country to the Cuban overlords.

And last but not least, it is important to note that Chavez's personal lifestyle, as well as the one of his family, most of the time did not agree with his official positions. So, where is the real Hugo Chavez?

IAEPHC poster bimbo?

I do not know who is going to be working in the IAEPHC. Candidates are numerous, and the battle is going to be harsh because Venezuela does not have grant money for hangers on as it used to do.  Not to mention that if Chavez had no problem financing sycophants, Maduro and and Cabello are probably going to be more tightfisted about financing people that, after all, are not going to directly praise them.  Still, we can be quite certain that the likes of Monedero, Ramonet and Harnecker are going to position themselves as fast as possible to get at least a few talking fees coming their way.

Still, let's be optimistic and hope that such an advanced institute may finally shine some light on the tortuous and vile mind of Chavez.

And you thought we could not go any lower.....

The Post Chavez era of propaganda

Having an arepa at my occasional hangout in San Felipe I was forced to read Ultimas Noticias as the last "national" paper still available. And I fell on this so telling regime propaganda that I could not resist to take a picture of the full page advertisement and deconstruct here for your pleasure. Click to enlarge.

Let's start by the obvious: PDVSA, the state oil company is paying for that advertisement to glorify Chavez by attaching it tot he memory of Simon Bolivar, on the week of the anniversary.  Of course, if Chavez was born late July it could nto be possibly for any other reason but to his link to Bolivar. Take that you other Leo babies! At any rate, PDVSA breaks the law but who cares at this point....

The message is simple: "In July dignity was born for ever". Of course, it means nothing, not even historically since Bolivar had nothing to do during the events of 1810 and 1811, the years when the idea of an independent Venezuela came to pass. But the message is elsewhere: it is the glorious army of Venezuela that made our independence, even if that is also historically false as Carabobo was won by "La Gran Colombia" forces in Venezuela. The point is to remind always that the army is top, very appropriate in our current corrupt military regime, where the new logo on the bottom left shows a red Bolivar with sword next to a brown shirted Chavez (the mistake in the scheme?). A Chavez which of seems more important than Bolivar if you ask me.  But they are a "single heart", who cares?

But this is not all in the post Chavez propaganda concept. Now that Capriles and the opposition hover at 50% it is important to rally and radicalize the bases. As such the two people in the picture are not brown skinned, they are African America outright. Reverse racism for you, sir!

The regime also preys on the weakest link, the single mother who finally is getting a home. This is what is supposedly depicted in the back, with posters of Chavez duly plastered with "mision vivienda", the massive building program that bankrupted the country but got Chavez reelected last year even though it is still so far in solving the housing problem. Thus we have the "dignification" of the single mother who for all practical purpose is now wed to the memory of Chavez, the only man that cared for her ever.

I am sure I can come up with yet more subliminal stuff but that is enough for now, you get the point. From Chavez ghost floating all above us to such crass propaganda, it is only going to get worse as the regime has nothing to show for.

The ghost of Chavez over the Venezuelan fleet

Today is the birthday of Bolivar, and as a happy coincidence for some parties, the victory of Maracaibo lake which was the last "battle" fought against Spain for independence. Thus it is also the navy's day. We got a never ending cadena for idiot political speech and an even more idiotic naval parade. Among other things we could verify that indeed we have more admirals, vice admirals and counter admirals than serviceable battle ships. The naval parade had to include peñeros to bulk up some...

Normally I would not watch it but I was lazy in my hammock enjoying the fee afternoon and waited to turn off TV. When suddenly I saw Chavez ghost...  Thus I grabbed my camera and made this 30sec clip for you....




Yes, they use the soundtrack of Chavez singing the national anthem to lead the navy officers and the public along. For the TV audience, mostly chavista lumpen at this stage and idiot bloggers with too much time on their hands, they appropriately fade in and out a ghost of Chavez, all well calculated. Observe also that they all wear the now standard fascist arm band of the regime.

I did not record it for you but later own they had the staging on a truck float of the alleged soldiers discussion at the Maracaibo battle, totally out of military context, totally out of historical record, pathetically silly.

And of course, besides rewriting history and using historical symbols for political partiality, the occasion was used to attack the opposition.

Fascism always evolve towards ridicule. It cannot be helped. But what is very dangerous is how the navy allows itself to be so politically manipulated, permeated......