This Vice documentary on violence in El Salvador is from last November, but I just watched it and thought it was pretty well done. The impression I get is that the state has largely abandoned many poor neighborhoods and that gangs, which mostly originated in the US before being transplanted to El Salvador via mass deportations during the Reagan era, have sort of taken its place. There was a truce between the police/government and the gangs for a while, but that seems to have fallen apart, and the main gangs are at war with each other as well. El Salvador now rivals Honduras in terms of its murder rate, although the situation could also be described as a low-intensity war.
but, at the same time, if you cannot afford flour at $5 but you can afford to queue to buy it at $3, it's still unambiguously better off for you.
IDK is being able to only afford 3lbs or flour worse of than being able to afford 5lbs, but not being able to buy any because there is no flour at any of the stores.
Me being able to afford all the Unobtanium in the universe hasn't done me much good lately.
*nitpick: it's not the amount of flour in the example, but the cost per unit
anyway yea this is an awfully expensive way to ensure that those with only $3 of disposable income to spend on flour can get flour
nonetheless if there are lot of such people, the policy might sustain mass support
which is key to understanding how Venezuela got itself to its present state, I think
but, at the same time, if you cannot afford flour at $5 but you can afford to queue to buy it at $3, it's still unambiguously better off for you.
IDK is being able to only afford 3lbs or flour worse of than being able to afford 5lbs, but not being able to buy any because there is no flour at any of the stores.
Me being able to afford all the Unobtanium in the universe hasn't done me much good lately.
Yep. Making lines as a full time job (hello 10x Black Market, and fuck you) is that awful. And of course, completely military controlled.
Any conversation about Venezuelan politics, both past and present, starts with how despictable is our military and how they have always tried to rule their country as their personal fiefdom. Which is now a reality thanks to Chavez (a military man himself, let's not forget).
It's amazing learning about alot of countries in various parts of the world and finding out just how much the militaries of many places own and control alot of stuff. Disturbingly common.
it is an article of faith in Chavist political discourse that the 2002 attempted coup d'etat was marked by some conspiracy by private food distributors and logistics companies to collapse the Bolivarian Revolution (or what-have-you)
the prominence of the army in Venezuelan logistics seems to be relatively recent, maybe a decade old, although finding reliable figures is hard
but, at the same time, if you cannot afford flour at $5 but you can afford to queue to buy it at $3, it's still unambiguously better off for you.
IDK is being able to only afford 3lbs or flour worse of than being able to afford 5lbs, but not being able to buy any because there is no flour at any of the stores.
Me being able to afford all the Unobtanium in the universe hasn't done me much good lately.
Yep. Making lines as a full time job (hello 10x Black Market, and fuck you) is that awful. And of course, completely military controlled.
Any conversation about Venezuelan politics, both past and present, starts with how despictable is our military and how they have always tried to rule their country as their personal fiefdom. Which is now a reality thanks to Chavez (a military man himself, let's not forget).
It's amazing learning about alot of countries in various parts of the world and finding out just how much the militaries of many places own and control alot of stuff. Disturbingly common.
Plenty of revolutionaries in the world; not many Washingtons.
My perception has long been that Chavez-era Venezuela, for all its flaws in governance and economy, was significantly better than pre-Chavez Venezuela. Do @TryCatcher, @ronya, or others with more knowledge of the country's modern history agree?
This post-Chavez Venezuela period has been pretty rocky so far, though.
My perception has long been that Chavez-era Venezuela, for all its flaws in governance and economy, was significantly better than pre-Chavez Venezuela. Do @TryCatcher, @ronya, or others with more knowledge of the country's modern history agree?
This post-Chavez Venezuela period has been pretty rocky so far, though.
In pre-Chavez Venezuela crime was at bay, you could buy food and supplies at the market and there was the actual possibility of buying houses and cars.
my guess is that - especially before the oil price crash - life would have been significantly better for a large group of the rural/urban poor during Chavez-era Venezuela and significantly worse for a large group of the middle class
That's a fairly simplistic and wrong view of things.
Venezuela has had a long, long, LONG case of Dutch disease pretty much since Oil was discovered. The reason why a lot of poor people went with Chavez is that, back on the late 80's, oil prices also crashed, and a President that ruled during an Oil boom, Carlos Andrés Pérez, won the elections on the promise that he was going to make the oil prices high again and keep the IMF-brand austerity measures away.
That, uh, didn't happened (mainly because it was impossible and was irresponsible to promise that on the first place). So, people rioted and Chavez and his merry band of Castro-sponsored coupsters had the chance to try to remove Carlos Andrés Pérez and be branded as heroes. It doesn't help that the media back then pushed said narrative. Chavez gets into power and manages to ride an oil boom irresponsibly. The oil boom goes away and here we are.
my impression of the caracazo is that the main objection was to the removal of unsustainable petrol subsidies
which, by the by, continue to be unsustainable. yet here we are.
I think it's fairly straightforward that successfully removing said subsidies would have indeed made a lot of the urban poor worse off; in that sense their support for the subsidies is to be expected
Is a lot of semantics for the same point, that a lot of people on our history have made: Venezuela has to find a way to be less dependant on oil, and there's the resources for that (hello mining sector and tourism sector left to rot by Chavez), what it has always been lacking is political will. It doesn't help how the well is poisoned by idiotic and plain evil Castro-Che romanticism and our history handling that issue. Can expand on that if people want to hear it.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Modern Venezuelan history starts with the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. To have a functional goverment and, you know, not having the country dissolve into civil war, the Punto Fijo Pact was created, in which Venezuelan democracy was established between three of the participants of the coup against Perez Jimenez on 58, Democratic Action, COPEI and URD.
The fourth participant of the coup, the Communist Party of Venezuela, was excluded from the pact, and found itself irrelevant, with barely a 3.2% of the vote on the consequent election. Embittered, with ties to the Soviet Union, and in the example of the Cuban Revolution, they started a guerrilla campaign against Romulo Betancourt, the elected president, from Democratic Action, which caused it to be outlawed once more, and the country went through a bitter period of fighting against the newly formed communist guerrilla, since Betancourt was firmly on the US's side against the Communists. Wikipedia writes it like this:
In the early 1960s, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the party became much more radical and launched a guerrilla war against the newly elected AD government led by Rómulo Betancourt, causing it to be outlawed once more. The PCV guerrilla effort was unable to mobilize substantial support from the Venezuelan peasantry, which largely supported Betancourt's reformism, and was unable to mount a serious military challenge to the new regime. Disillusioned with the guerrilla experience, the majority of PCV members split away from the party in 1971 to enter electoral politics as part of the reformist Movement toward Socialism (MAS). At the same time, a much smaller group of activists split off to form the trade-union based party La Causa Radical, better known as Causa R, a forerunner of today's Patria Para Todos party. Remaining Communist fighters were later given a general amnesty by President Rafael Caldera as part of his "pacificacion" process.
The last bit is the next part of the story. Rafael Caldera, now remembered as the man that signed away Chavez's treason charges, as part of his "pacification" process and to avoid the example of Colombia make the PCV legal again, but they didn't managed to get much of the vote. Turns out that people had this adversion to vote for Guerrila terrorists for some reason.
Enter Chavez, and the PCV inmediatly supported him, and the Chavez coalition denounced the Punto Fijo pact as the cause of all Venezuelan misfortunes. In power, they lionized Castro and the Che Guevara, and implemented Soviet measures like price controls, that had predictable results aka a good chunk of our current crisis. All of it because they held a grudge against Betancourt and the country for almost half a century.
My perception has long been that Chavez-era Venezuela, for all its flaws in governance and economy, was significantly better than pre-Chavez Venezuela. Do @TryCatcher, @ronya, or others with more knowledge of the country's modern history agree?
This post-Chavez Venezuela period has been pretty rocky so far, though.
It depends where you want to look. The government prior to Chavez was the Pérez administration; democratically elected neo-liberal centrists (prior to that, Venezuela was under a dictatorship). There were also having severe economic problems related to tying oil to the economy (you'll note a trend that happens whenever a state decided to tie it's economic future to trading commodities), stole about $250M Bolivars from Venezuelan coffers and in February of 1989 ordered the massacre of 500+ protestors who had assembled in Caracas to protest the deteriorating economic situation.
This act of violence sort-of broke a dam in Venezuelan politics & paved the for widespread support of Chavez.
However, as @TryCatcher points out, a sufficiently wealthy person living in Venezuela under Pérez would probably have been much better off, as they weren't actually dealing with price control created shortages or agricultural problems (at least, not at the same scale).
EDIT: Before someone criticizes the '500' figure - yes, that is the lowest possible estimate. Thus the '+' sign. Estimates range from 500 - 3,000 killed. We don't have good figures for the body count because it was such a highly politicized tragedy. A lot of people were killed for very little reason.
It's a shame that Chavez passed away too soon, just before the inevitable collapse. He didn't get to see it blow up in his face. I think this is the first time I've ever wanted a dictator to have lived longer than they did. I feel icky.
It's a shame that Chavez passed away too soon, just before the inevitable collapse. He didn't get to see it blow up in his face. I think this is the first time I've ever wanted a dictator to have lived longer than they did. I feel icky.
Don't worry, is a fairly common feeling. Mainly because Maduro is an imbecile that everybody hates and is going to be used as a scapegoat. Quite a bit of the Army coupsters aka the Chavez gang would love to get rid of the idiot and put one of their own in charge again, specially with the DEA on their heels. Everything behind closed doors, so it enters on the rumor field.
the protests were about the withdrawal of subsidies
which (as you'll point out) is basically the same point. I would emphasize that the rigmarole with the exchange rate and the price control is an attempt to maintain the subsidies - relaxing either would cause the real price of domestic oil and food to rise
the chavez regime inherited some additional features, in particular a turkey-esque narrative about the "deep state" and a supposed conspiracy of the civil service and white-collar professions against his government. My own interpretation is that 1) there were some feeble attempts at a general strike, but 2) like general strikes elsewhere, they would have fallen apart on their own. In any case, however, the regime took it as a sign that their own middle social class of professionals could not be trusted to execute the physical processes of governing a country, hence doubling down on even more inefficient and corruptible methods of implementing subsidies. they're not doing it because the Soviets did it inasmuch as because it's the most straightforward way to distribute the flow of petrodollars without actually trusting anybody
really, as Soviets go, the main similarity is the hard currency crisis
I don't think there could have been a path whereby an early-2000s government of Venezuela escapes either slaughtering a lot more protestors in order to reassert control over metropolitan Caracas, or conceding to an unsustainable and ultimately doomed popular demand for food and petrol subsidies. Which were known to be untenable in 2000, never mind today. The additional failings of the regime are real - the corruption, the lack of investment, the shortages - but these don't seem to be as decisive as the continuing reliance on oil being above $30 a barrel in order to afford subsidies
the protests were about the withdrawal of subsidies
which (as you'll point out) is basically the same point. I would emphasize that the rigmarole with the exchange rate and the price control is an attempt to maintain the subsidies - relaxing either would cause the real price of domestic oil and food to rise
the chavez regime inherited some additional features, in particular a turkey-esque narrative about the "deep state" and a supposed conspiracy of the civil service and white-collar professions against his government. My own interpretation is that 1) there were some feeble attempts at a general strike, but 2) like general strikes elsewhere, they would have fallen apart on their own. In any case, however, the regime took it as a sign that their own middle social class of professionals could not be trusted to execute the physical processes of governing a country, hence doubling down on even more inefficient and corruptible methods of implementing subsidies. they're not doing it because the Soviets did it inasmuch as because it's the most straightforward way to distribute the flow of petrodollars without actually trusting anybody
really, as Soviets go, the main similarity is the hard currency crisis
I don't think there could have been a path whereby an early-2000s government of Venezuela escapes either slaughtering a lot more protestors in order to reassert control over metropolitan Caracas, or conceding to an unsustainable and ultimately doomed popular demand for food and petrol subsidies. Which were known to be untenable in 2000, never mind today. The additional failings of the regime are real - the corruption, the lack of investment, the shortages - but these don't seem to be as decisive as the continuing reliance on oil being above $30 a barrel in order to afford subsidies
Well, they could have abandoned the committal to exports and began creating a service-based economy. Granted, you can't exactly just flip a switch and *poof* here's your service economy, but it would have perhaps opened doors for some foreign aid / IMF grants to keep the fuel & food subsidies around until they had a more sustainable trade / commerce model in place.
venezuela - particularly in metropolitan caracas - is already similar to a developed country in terms of deindustrialization; the service sector employs a majority of the country
but services are not particularly amenable to being exported to obtain hard currency, so that does not really solve the problem of finding other ways to obtain hard currency
Venezuela has other resources besides Oil. Gold, bauxite, gas, farming, tourism, etc. Is enough to keep the subsidies? No. But any post-Chavista goverment is going to have to go to the IMF ASAP, that is going to put as a condition for a bailout the end of the subsidies. And quite frankly, that doesn't sound that bad, given that it solves the shortage problem and eliminates the black market, that by definition is overpriced to compensate the extra risks and bribes neccesary to keep it floating.
the chavez regime inherited some additional features, in particular a turkey-esque narrative about the "deep state" and a supposed conspiracy of the civil service and white-collar professions against his government. My own interpretation is that 1) there were some feeble attempts at a general strike, but 2) like general strikes elsewhere, they would have fallen apart on their own. In any case, however, the regime took it as a sign that their own middle social class of professionals could not be trusted to execute the physical processes of governing a country, hence doubling down on even more inefficient and corruptible methods of implementing subsidies. they're not doing it because the Soviets did it inasmuch as because it's the most straightforward way to distribute the flow of petrodollars without actually trusting anybody
You occasionally see idiots going on about how government should fear its people.
Jesus Galvez did not want to talk about socialism, or any ideology - he was just fed up. A resident of the Chacao neighbourhood of Caracas, he and his neighbours were on their third day without electricity.
They had taken to the streets in protest when what food they had went rotten because their fridges had stopped working and they had no power supply for cooking.
"It is unbelievable that we are suffering this," he says, incredulity etched on his face. He promises there will be more and bigger protests if things do not improve - that they will block the main roads if necessary.
I ask Jesus what will happen if economic conditions get worse generally in Venezuela, and he offers an unexpectedly simple answer: "There will be a civil war."
The impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has suffered a setback.
The acting speaker of Brazil's lower house, Waldir Maranhao, has annulled a vote in the lower house on 17 April that allowed the proceedings to go on to the Senate.
The Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to start an impeachment trial on Wednesday,
Man, this thing has been a roller coaster to follow.
Global Americans, a group of scholars doing much-needed work in the region, just published a comprehensive report to scrutinise the role of Latin American countries in upholding human rights across South America. In other words, they’ve looked at -for example- UNASUR, and proven what we already suspected: when it comes to protecting our freedoms, the institution is a waste of money (and, frankly, of good oxygen). The report also looks at other mechanisms like the UN Human Rights Council and the Inter-American system and evaluates the real value they add.
Report here.
They also had a small interview with Christopher Sabatini, Executive Director for Global Americans. Money quote:
CC: The New Kids on the Bloc, as you call the UNASUR/CELAC duo, have always been associated with the left-wing agenda in the region. How is it that they haven’t managed to bring agreements and solutions to indigenous disputes in the region, which -as we can see in your report- are spiralling out of control?
CS: There’s a certain irony in the so-called leftist governments like Morales’, Correa’s or Chavez/Maduro’s or the Ortega’s: they’re not really modern left. Many of them are not progressive on many of the issues of today’s modern left: LGBT rights, indigenous rights, or women’s rights. Specifically, in the case of “consulta previa” provisions it’s been the “liberal, pro-market” states of Colombia, Chile, and Peru that have made the greatest progress.
LGBT rights on Venezuela have been pretty much trampled by the machismo/military worship of the Chavez era. There's a report of one of our NGOs about it, can always find it if people are interested.
President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro has revoked the National Assembly’s constitutional power to impeach government officials.
...
The president’s decision comes after the National Assembly decided to dismiss the Minister of Food Rodolfo Marco Torres, who was responsible for the country’s severe food shortages.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
The impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has suffered a setback.
The acting speaker of Brazil's lower house, Waldir Maranhao, has annulled a vote in the lower house on 17 April that allowed the proceedings to go on to the Senate.
The Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to start an impeachment trial on Wednesday,
Man, this thing has been a roller coaster to follow.
The impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has suffered a setback.
The acting speaker of Brazil's lower house, Waldir Maranhao, has annulled a vote in the lower house on 17 April that allowed the proceedings to go on to the Senate.
The Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to start an impeachment trial on Wednesday,
Man, this thing has been a roller coaster to follow.
it is an article of faith in Chavist political discourse that the 2002 attempted coup d'etat was marked by some conspiracy by private food distributors and logistics companies to collapse the Bolivarian Revolution (or what-have-you)
the prominence of the army in Venezuelan logistics seems to be relatively recent, maybe a decade old, although finding reliable figures is hard
I remember someone telling me that I was wrong when I said that maduro cheated, that we couldn't find food, and that Venezuela imported most of its basic goods. I was pissed because I fucking live here and then he was telling me how things were good now because the poor couldn't afford food before... And yet, the poor can afford even less food than before. At my house we can barely eat three times a day now.
My perception has long been that Chavez-era Venezuela, for all its flaws in governance and economy, was significantly better than pre-Chavez Venezuela.
NO, FUCK NO
I live in Venezuela, and pre-chavez Venezuela was leagues better. It was a terrible place, but it was livable, and we could afford to go to the supermarket or the drugstore whenever we damn pleased to buy what we needed. There was a good reason why in 2002 we had a nation-wide, month-long strike, it's so that shit like this wouldn't happen.
Now? We get running water once a week, we have to use napkins to wipe, we go to the supermarket to buy what's available, not what we need, only to come back empty-handed. I am diabetic, and every once in a while I have to leave my house on a long journey to find insulin and syringes, that more often than not is a waste of time. Not only that, my brother suffers from depression and we can't find his medicine. Oh, and being a diabetic when your diet is limited to "whatever the fuck is available" is not fun.
Everything is grim here, and I've wanted to move to another country, but I just don't have the means to do it.
I hope that whoever told me I was wrong thinking that chavez was a plague realizes I was right, because this is my reality, I'm living this, and no international media article can sum up how much of a shit hole this place has been for the past 17 years, and back then no international outlet was accurately reporting what was going on. Those who were doing a better job were ignored.
Second everything that @RockinX said. You know what it feels to have to scavenge medicines through all the drug stores of the city? To depend on charity from Twitter networks? That the last memories with a loved one are going from hospital to hospital searching for medicies and medical supplies? Watching the goverment send the National Guard against protesters because they were protesting for lack of cancer medicines?
Words can't describe how horrid it is. A bunch of Open Veins lectures won't change that.
Do you guys know how humiliating it is to feel happy when I find soap, syringes, dental paste, and other goods that other places consider basic and common? Or to feel joy when we get running water?
Holy shit, that's not the headline I was expecting. How much can the KSA's production even be increased at this point? They must be approaching an upper limit.
Posts
*nitpick: it's not the amount of flour in the example, but the cost per unit
anyway yea this is an awfully expensive way to ensure that those with only $3 of disposable income to spend on flour can get flour
nonetheless if there are lot of such people, the policy might sustain mass support
which is key to understanding how Venezuela got itself to its present state, I think
It's amazing learning about alot of countries in various parts of the world and finding out just how much the militaries of many places own and control alot of stuff. Disturbingly common.
the prominence of the army in Venezuelan logistics seems to be relatively recent, maybe a decade old, although finding reliable figures is hard
e: digging up this 2014 thread makes for rather grim reading
Plenty of revolutionaries in the world; not many Washingtons.
This post-Chavez Venezuela period has been pretty rocky so far, though.
In pre-Chavez Venezuela crime was at bay, you could buy food and supplies at the market and there was the actual possibility of buying houses and cars.
So....
how large each group is, I don't know
Venezuela has had a long, long, LONG case of Dutch disease pretty much since Oil was discovered. The reason why a lot of poor people went with Chavez is that, back on the late 80's, oil prices also crashed, and a President that ruled during an Oil boom, Carlos Andrés Pérez, won the elections on the promise that he was going to make the oil prices high again and keep the IMF-brand austerity measures away.
That, uh, didn't happened (mainly because it was impossible and was irresponsible to promise that on the first place). So, people rioted and Chavez and his merry band of Castro-sponsored coupsters had the chance to try to remove Carlos Andrés Pérez and be branded as heroes. It doesn't help that the media back then pushed said narrative. Chavez gets into power and manages to ride an oil boom irresponsibly. The oil boom goes away and here we are.
which, by the by, continue to be unsustainable. yet here we are.
I think it's fairly straightforward that successfully removing said subsidies would have indeed made a lot of the urban poor worse off; in that sense their support for the subsidies is to be expected
Modern Venezuelan history starts with the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. To have a functional goverment and, you know, not having the country dissolve into civil war, the Punto Fijo Pact was created, in which Venezuelan democracy was established between three of the participants of the coup against Perez Jimenez on 58, Democratic Action, COPEI and URD.
The fourth participant of the coup, the Communist Party of Venezuela, was excluded from the pact, and found itself irrelevant, with barely a 3.2% of the vote on the consequent election. Embittered, with ties to the Soviet Union, and in the example of the Cuban Revolution, they started a guerrilla campaign against Romulo Betancourt, the elected president, from Democratic Action, which caused it to be outlawed once more, and the country went through a bitter period of fighting against the newly formed communist guerrilla, since Betancourt was firmly on the US's side against the Communists. Wikipedia writes it like this:
The last bit is the next part of the story. Rafael Caldera, now remembered as the man that signed away Chavez's treason charges, as part of his "pacification" process and to avoid the example of Colombia make the PCV legal again, but they didn't managed to get much of the vote. Turns out that people had this adversion to vote for Guerrila terrorists for some reason.
Enter Chavez, and the PCV inmediatly supported him, and the Chavez coalition denounced the Punto Fijo pact as the cause of all Venezuelan misfortunes. In power, they lionized Castro and the Che Guevara, and implemented Soviet measures like price controls, that had predictable results aka a good chunk of our current crisis. All of it because they held a grudge against Betancourt and the country for almost half a century.
It depends where you want to look. The government prior to Chavez was the Pérez administration; democratically elected neo-liberal centrists (prior to that, Venezuela was under a dictatorship). There were also having severe economic problems related to tying oil to the economy (you'll note a trend that happens whenever a state decided to tie it's economic future to trading commodities), stole about $250M Bolivars from Venezuelan coffers and in February of 1989 ordered the massacre of 500+ protestors who had assembled in Caracas to protest the deteriorating economic situation.
This act of violence sort-of broke a dam in Venezuelan politics & paved the for widespread support of Chavez.
However, as @TryCatcher points out, a sufficiently wealthy person living in Venezuela under Pérez would probably have been much better off, as they weren't actually dealing with price control created shortages or agricultural problems (at least, not at the same scale).
EDIT: Before someone criticizes the '500' figure - yes, that is the lowest possible estimate. Thus the '+' sign. Estimates range from 500 - 3,000 killed. We don't have good figures for the body count because it was such a highly politicized tragedy. A lot of people were killed for very little reason.
But the beer is gone.
This is not going to be pleasant.
People do not like being cut off.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
which (as you'll point out) is basically the same point. I would emphasize that the rigmarole with the exchange rate and the price control is an attempt to maintain the subsidies - relaxing either would cause the real price of domestic oil and food to rise
the chavez regime inherited some additional features, in particular a turkey-esque narrative about the "deep state" and a supposed conspiracy of the civil service and white-collar professions against his government. My own interpretation is that 1) there were some feeble attempts at a general strike, but 2) like general strikes elsewhere, they would have fallen apart on their own. In any case, however, the regime took it as a sign that their own middle social class of professionals could not be trusted to execute the physical processes of governing a country, hence doubling down on even more inefficient and corruptible methods of implementing subsidies. they're not doing it because the Soviets did it inasmuch as because it's the most straightforward way to distribute the flow of petrodollars without actually trusting anybody
really, as Soviets go, the main similarity is the hard currency crisis
I don't think there could have been a path whereby an early-2000s government of Venezuela escapes either slaughtering a lot more protestors in order to reassert control over metropolitan Caracas, or conceding to an unsustainable and ultimately doomed popular demand for food and petrol subsidies. Which were known to be untenable in 2000, never mind today. The additional failings of the regime are real - the corruption, the lack of investment, the shortages - but these don't seem to be as decisive as the continuing reliance on oil being above $30 a barrel in order to afford subsidies
Well, they could have abandoned the committal to exports and began creating a service-based economy. Granted, you can't exactly just flip a switch and *poof* here's your service economy, but it would have perhaps opened doors for some foreign aid / IMF grants to keep the fuel & food subsidies around until they had a more sustainable trade / commerce model in place.
but services are not particularly amenable to being exported to obtain hard currency, so that does not really solve the problem of finding other ways to obtain hard currency
You occasionally see idiots going on about how government should fear its people.
Terrible idea.
For corruption.
At the end of the day will there be a politician above the rank of local alderman who isn't going to prison?
Yes! This guy!
Because he ratted a bunch of people out.
Which I am pleased about because it enables more prosecutions.
But still, what a fucking mess.
Because FARC wasn't enough of an issue for Colombia.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-36233734
Terrifying quote:
Local Opposition Leader Shot Dead Ahead Of Venezuela Elections
Or does it!
Man, this thing has been a roller coaster to follow.
Report here.
They also had a small interview with Christopher Sabatini, Executive Director for Global Americans. Money quote:
LGBT rights on Venezuela have been pretty much trampled by the machismo/military worship of the Chavez era. There's a report of one of our NGOs about it, can always find it if people are interested.
- John Stuart Mill
Seriously
Brazil crisis: Rousseff impeachment process 'back on track'
And now Rousseff has appealed to the Supreme Court to block the impeachment.
http://www.thenation.com/article/a-slavers-coup-in-brazil/
I remember someone telling me that I was wrong when I said that maduro cheated, that we couldn't find food, and that Venezuela imported most of its basic goods. I was pissed because I fucking live here and then he was telling me how things were good now because the poor couldn't afford food before... And yet, the poor can afford even less food than before. At my house we can barely eat three times a day now.
NO, FUCK NO
I live in Venezuela, and pre-chavez Venezuela was leagues better. It was a terrible place, but it was livable, and we could afford to go to the supermarket or the drugstore whenever we damn pleased to buy what we needed. There was a good reason why in 2002 we had a nation-wide, month-long strike, it's so that shit like this wouldn't happen.
Now? We get running water once a week, we have to use napkins to wipe, we go to the supermarket to buy what's available, not what we need, only to come back empty-handed. I am diabetic, and every once in a while I have to leave my house on a long journey to find insulin and syringes, that more often than not is a waste of time. Not only that, my brother suffers from depression and we can't find his medicine. Oh, and being a diabetic when your diet is limited to "whatever the fuck is available" is not fun.
Everything is grim here, and I've wanted to move to another country, but I just don't have the means to do it.
I hope that whoever told me I was wrong thinking that chavez was a plague realizes I was right, because this is my reality, I'm living this, and no international media article can sum up how much of a shit hole this place has been for the past 17 years, and back then no international outlet was accurately reporting what was going on. Those who were doing a better job were ignored.
Words can't describe how horrid it is. A bunch of Open Veins lectures won't change that.