ANTI MADURO PROTESTS IN VENEZUELA

Protests have been taking place in Venezuela since early February. The root causes are lousy economic policies started under Chávez. I lean towards corruption, the gradual destruction of the country´s agricultural and industrial capacity, monetary policy which lead to high inflation and then hyperinflation, and the Exchange rate peg.

These are all linked in a complex dance, and tend to have positive feedbacks. Thus the destruction of internal production capacity led to the need to import more. This in turn required hard currency they got from oil exports. Chavez had plenty of money after he took over in 1999, because oil prices continued to climb (they went up about six fold from 1999 when he took over). But the government chose to keep import prices very low, and thus they fixed the currency Exchange rate to créate an extremely strong Bolívar. This in turn made local production non competetive, and thus the locals produced less, and there was more need for imports. To map out the whole process I would have to show you a dynamic model in which you can see year after year the gradual decay of the economy. This wasn´t helped by theft and corruption, and the aid Chavez was sending to Cuba and other nations to buy diplomatic cover.

But by early 2012 the economy had reached a really bad crossroads. And yet Chavez faced October 2012 elections, so they decided to borrow a lot of money (about $40 billion from China, for example), and they stopped paying their bills, or slowed down payments to get more cash in hand. So by making a huge effort at throwing money at the economy, Chavez won the election. Then he told the people the truth, he had terminal cáncer, and two months later he disappeared from view. Officially he died in March 2013. Many of us think he died months before.

Before he disappeared in December 2012 Chavez announced Maduro would replace him. Thus Maduro faced a presidential election against a very popular opposition leader, Capriles. This meant Maduro couldn´t fix the economy taking the medicine. He threw more money at the economy, it´s rumoured they even flew gold bars to China in Exchange for more loans (by then the Chinese were getting cold feet). Maduro is said to have won in April 2013, by 51 to 49 %. The opposition asked for a full audit, including the voter registers because it was suspected Maduro got the vote total rigged by having dead people vote (in Venezuela the process to remove a dead person from the voter rolls is very complex).

Thus when Maduro "runs" the government from December 2012 to April 2013 throwing money and using chewing gum and bailing wire to try to get popular. Then he takes over and starts a series of really stupid moves. For example he had shut off the secondary Exchange market, SITME, and failed to provide a vehicle for businesses to get dollars to import food, medicine, spares, components, etc. As the hard currency dried up the businesses started cutting back production (for example Toyota, General motors, paper mills, bottlers, the few food packagers left). Maduro is an ex bus driver, and he seems to get conflicting advice. So inflation shot up as the shortages increased, the Price controls being ineffective to curtail inflation, but having a perverse effect by causing scarcity.

But things were going bad to worse when Maduro, facing municipal elections he wanted to have chavistas win, ordered the takeover of stores to force sales at low prices. Many of these stores were actually run by chavistas or people linked to chavistas, but by then Maduro was desperate. In some cases people didn´t wait for the army to take over the stores, so they got looted. By early december the bulk of store and warehouses were nearly empty. But the chavista mass was happy with the cheap junk they got. And thus Maduro´s party got to win a majority of the popular vote. BUT the reds lost all the major cities, except for the Libertador disctrict in Caracas (Caracas has five metropolitan districts, each has a mayor and its own police force, etc).

 And this left the country in a funny situation, with opposition mayors controling all the major cities, the government controlled all the media, and started cutting off print to newspapers, and threatened journalists if there was any reporting which went contrary to their line. They also control the army, the national guard, the courts, most police forces, secret police, and have tens of thousands of Cubans embedded in Venezuela, which function as anything from medical personnel to supervisors in notaries, as well as control the issue of government issue ID cards and Passports. And it is said they have people embedded in the military control structure and quite a few Cubans in the secret police (I can´t confirm this but we do notice the type of Spanish used by government officials has changed and includes many Cuban terms and sentence construction as if they had spent a lot of time with Cubans).

But all of this would have left people incredibly pissed off but not doing much, until there was a small spark in San Cristóbal in Tachira. San Cristóbal has an opposition mayor. The opposition got 70 % of the vote in that particular region during the presidential election. Why? because it´s close to the Colombian border. People there, and I mean everybody, has been gaining from cross border smuggling. They take a bag of flour sold for $1 equivalent in Venezuela, and go over the border into Colombia and sell it to a Colombian wholesaler for $10. The government started cutting off the flow of food, medicine and fuels to the region around San Cristóbal. This caused hunger and a lot of anger. And the angry people included everybody in those towns.

So the stage was set. In Early February there was an atempted rape on campus in San Cristóbal. The girl managed to escape, but the student organization started a protest asking for more cops on campus. It was as simple as that. The National Guard commander was a chavista thug. He knew that town was opposition, and he responded with brute force. There were quite a few people beaten on camera, and six students were arrested.

These guys in San Cristóbal are tough. They are the Venezuelan version of the West Texans. People who have their own culture (they are isolated from Caracas and other cities by the Andes or by jungle like áreas full of FARC and thieves). So the protests escalated and it got really nasty.

The student movement in Caracas had planned a protest on February 12th, the Day of the Student in Venezuela. But given the arrests and repression in San Cristóbal they added a move to deliver a demand to the Interior Minister to reléase the prisoners taken in that town. The protest went to the Interior Ministry. It was massive because Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader asked for the people to protest that day and ask for the release of the prisoners and for the government to fix the street crime and lack of food.

AFTER the main protest had dissolved, around 2 PM, a large group of students was walking home in a low middle class área called La Candelaria when they found their way barred by National Guard. Gradually they were all herded in a small sector. All the exits were blocked by National GUardsmen. And these guardsmen allowed a group of shooters (which later was confirmed by the government were secret police agents) to enter the streets where the students were wandering around looking for a way out. The shooting started and they killed one student right on camera.

 They wounded a few more, and also killed a communist leader called Juan Montoya.I think the purpose of the ambush and the shooting was to kill Juan Montoya, known as a collective leader and also known as Commander Muchachi, leader of the Comandos Carapaica. This guy had already expressed his disapproval of the ongoing corruption. So I suspect Maduro had him killed. Maduro needs to make moves, and a heavily armed bunch of communists running around inside Caracas cant be allowed. So he decapitated that organization.

But the killing of THE STUDENT got people pissed off (I think that shooting was a cover, they had to kill at least one more person, that student was shot very neatly with a single bullet in the back of the head). Thus the protests increased. And the government started a wave of repression by unleashing the National Guard, but even worse, they unleashed the Colectivos. These colectivos are like Hitler´s Brown shirts. They are civilians, armed by Chavez with weapons ranging from 9 mm automatics to fully automatic assault rifles (the Carapaica commandos even displayed a rocket launcher in one of their videos).

The human rights abuses are a mix of actions, about one third are national guard and police. About two thirds are Brown shirts or biker gangs. The government calls for the Brown shirts to act (this includes a call by Maduro on national TV three days ago to "put out the flame" by the "organizations and collectives"). The Venezuelan people also understand Maduro is a puppet and the repression is ordered by Raul Castro. This elevates the anger, and even chavistas hate the idea that Venezuelan may be turning into a Cuban colony.

Thus things have escalated. The wave of terror is bad. People are holed up in their houses, and now the Brown shirts are going inside and dragging people out. There people are taken away and nobody knows for sure how many or where they are taken. 

Opposition leaders have been arrested using trumped up or unlawful charges, and the government-controlled "Supreme Court" has announced there´s no need to have Chavista electoral authorities, Supreme Court members, nor the National Controller be in their posts with National Assembly approval (the opposition has sufficient members in the National Assembly to influence votes on approval of some senior government positions such as Supreme Court Justices, so the move amounts to a suspension of Constitutional rights). 

Venezuelans are for the most part a mild mannered people. Venezuelans are just shooting videos of people getting dragged and then they cry and make phone calls and get interviewed by foreign correspondents who do manage to get through. When I consider what I saw in Cuba when I was young, this is still a D movie. Santa Clara, where I lived when we overthrew Batista was a C. Aleppo or Baghdad when the US invaded are a B. Dresden and Guernica are an A.

So it can get worse. But I don´t think it will. I see the current terror wave as a means to impose Maduro´s will (and therefore the Cuban´s will) on the population. This will lead to a mass exodus. THus the whole thing may have been planned and encouraged. Maybe this is just a slight variation of an  ethnic cleansing campaign,  we could call it a sociopolitical  cleansing campaign. 

We should change football rules

We should change football⁽¹⁾ rules. I am convinced  these rules aren't  fair and we must change them.  This  idea came to me after seeing the Qatar team defeat the Milanese of Fly Emirates 4-0.

As good communists, and in the name of justice, we can’t allow this unfairness to continue. There’s too much  opportunism  in the sport.  The game must change so that all teams have roughly the same chance of being  European champions  (after we fix the  Europeans  we can fix the rest of  the world,  just be patient).

The aim would be to avoid seeing players like  Kevin-Prince Boateng scratching their  heads this way after such a pasting:

I know Boateng, like the other player who scored a goal in the first leg in Milan (Sulley Muntari) is from a  Ghanaian family. These guys play for the Fly Emirates team in Milan because they pay very well,  and will not suffer the same pain as an Italian who really has Fly Emirates in his blood.  But all these players are members of the proletariate, and we must also consider the mental health of people living in those  loser cities (my condolences to Manchester).

 We can  make things better. I worked this out  with other members of the communist party secretariate, and we concluded   the key is to reduce the advantage more talented players have.  So we propose to  start with a change of rules, to help slower players who have worse aim to get as many goals (or at least almost as many) as very talented  players like  Leo Messi.

It occured to us  this can be done simply by widening  the goal to reach almost the entire width of the football field. As you know, today  the arc is a toddler, and it's  really hard to score a goal from a distance.

 

A wider arch many would allow ordinary players score lots of goals. So we propose to widen it , to make it  look like this:

 

This way goalkeepers won’t  stop anything!

Then,  to be sure even more equality reigns in the sport, we can remove the silly rule that says a player is offsides  (that is,  out of position) when he’s  standing on a spot the referee doesn’t like.

I know, I know.  Now you “experts” will say  this rule has its complexities, but that's not true. A referee can’t  run as fast as today’s  players. This means he can’t see if the player is out of position or not. And I tell you that because besides being a writer and Communist Party activist, I was also a football referee. And I could never run as fast as the players did, nor  could  I see exactly what was going on. So I raised the flag when I felt like it.  And this is  exactly what  referees do. Everybody knows  it.

I think these two changes will suffice. We can start this year, during the European club championships,  to  see if the results are favorable and spread out the scoring . For example, if we see the Unesco team win the whole enchilada, then we’ll know we are on the right track.

European football Glossary:

Fly Emirates - AC Milan

Qatar - Barcelona

Bwin - Real Madrid

Unesco - Málaga

------------

Footnote 1.  In the USA they think football is American football, and they think football is soccer. This confusion arises from their refusal to adopt the international metric system.

Chavez’s corpse should be plastinated

On March 8 the Babalao⁽¹⁾ of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, announced that the body of former President Hugo Chavez would be embalmed and displayed in a museum in Caracas. This goes along with the ancient tradition of preserving the bodies of saints and important people, and  put them on display  for believers. Interestingly, this religious tradition is practiced  in many communist countries, it was used with Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh.

As a good communist, I peregrinated to Moscow and Beijing to visit Lenin and Mao respectively.  And if I can I will visit Chavez when he’s  mounted in the museum display.

I know that seems silly, to go on a pilgrimage to see Chavez in a museum, but it is a quasi-religious tradition adopted by the communist community.  Besides, the idea is not to pray to the dead, because  communists don’t believe in anything. The idea is to stand in line for many hours and then come back with a postcard showing the dead in his glass casket.  That gives one  special status, like a Catholic who goes to  see Santiago de Compostela, the apostle who saved the Spanish when he  jumped on a horse and helped defeat the Muslims at the Battle of Clavijo.

Of course, Santiago is different. I don’t think he really rode on a white horse and killed seventy thousand Muslims in one day.  But the belief that this occurred allowed a handful of Spanish to defeat the Moors.

 

The problem we have is that neither Lenin nor Mao  help in a battle for communism. They are completely useless.  To show you how crappy they are serving as communist totems, today the Soviet Union doesn’t  exist.  Communist China was delivered by its own leaders into the claws of savage capitalism with such relish  that today China  has more inequality than the Yankee empire.

Hell, the Chinese are so sold out  the only thing they are lacking is being part of the British empire. Those quislings are capable of requesting  the British  monarch  to  serve as their head of state,  and be available to bitch at  the  Politburo when it misbehaves.  Hell, if they do  join up,  they  would become part of  the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and China! That'll be a huge empire. Take note, Yankees.

Returning to the main theme, we Communists could worship  a politician who has been dead for a while. We  could try to find  somebody like St. Vincent de Paul, who founded the Congregation of the Mission intended to help the poor, and also helped form the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity. This saint is highly respected and is in a glass coffin for people to see. San Vicent used to say  "helping  the poor is to be preferred to anything else", this could be the new communist party slogan!

The problem I see with this approach  is that if people really  believe it and expect it to be fulfilled, we party leaders  won’t  get  the large houses, or that extra  share we have coming.  And then all this communist talk  isn’t worth it. So I think it's best to have a seasoned saint like Santiago, who fights with a sword but also has a reputation for helping the poor without overdoing the last part.  We need an icon to help us kill seventy thousand capitalists in one day when we have to do it. And let's cut back on the helping the poor part, please.  It is best to have a symbol of saintliness who fights real hard, and help us to bury the empire, as Nikita Khrushchev told us we would do someday.

Chavez can serve this role. His body has to be preserved and displayed. But I am of the opinion that we must go further,  and adopt a modern practice to preserve the body, so he can really serve us as a powerful icon for many years.

Embalming  corpses is common practice in the United States.  The yanks even  have college courses for embalmers, and embalming has become big business. People,  we can’t  continue copying the Yankee empire all the time. This is disgusting.  Plus they say the Russian embalmers Maduro hired gave up and say he's too ripe to put through the treatment.  So we have to do something different and original.  We have to have a little imagination from time to time.  My proposal is to have the  body of former President Hugo Chavez plasticized or plastinated and displayed in a fierce pose. If possible with a riding stick in his hand.  Mounted this way, Chavez  will give us a boost we can’t possibly get from a  dead man stuck in a glass case.

What  does plastinated mean? Plastination is a technique developed by German chemist Gunther von Hagens. He is the one who runs the Body Works (Koeperwelten)  exbihit. Plastination involves several steps: 1. the body is placed in  a tub full of acetone, which replaces the natural fluids; 2; pressure is lowered and this evaporates the acetone, and the vapors are removed;  3.  plastic polymers are  placed in the tub, they penetrate the body and turn it into something like a plastic statue.

Plastination is much better than embalming.  It  meets  Maduro’s  desire that Chavez's body last forever. Or at least  for a thousand years. I think it's a great idea. It's original, has never been used on a  politician’s corpse, and the body can be mounted in a way that inspires us Chavez followers to fight hard for communism.  I propose a pose  showing Chavez mounted on a horse, placed on  a pedestal in a museum hall where the faithful can see it close up, something like this:

People, I know it's radical, and some of you  will have a bit of nausea, but it must be done, because capitalism isn’t  going to surrender easily.  And if  the Chinese really do get into the British Empire, it  will be really tough to  convince anyone to cooperate with us so we can  build the communist workers' paradise. Please support this  idea, pass the word along to your friends, and let's see if we convince the Politburo to do it.

------------

Footnote 1.  The “Babalao” is a witch doctor in the Caribbean “Santeria” cult. The white dress indicates the person is pure and can communicate with the spirits of the dead. Maduro apparently thinks  he can convey the idea that Chavez speaks through him by dressing in white. There are rumours around, they say Chavez practiced Santeria and had Bolivar’s body disinterred  and  used in Santeria rites.  Some believers in Santeria and the related Maria Lionza cult think Bolivar’s ghost became enraged when Chavez took him out of the grave, and killed Chavez with a deadly cancer.

How I learned to play American football

This is the story of how I learned to play American football. When I left Spain to live in the U.S., I started  high school immediately, and of course  I had physical education classes, which in the U.S. they called "Gym".  Because it  was the beginning of the school year, the first thing they did  did was sit me down to watch  a film about American football.  The film explained  how the game was played at a professional level.  I remember  the speaker was a man named Frank Tarkenton, quarterback of the New York Giants, and he talked a lot about how to throw the ball, which isn’t like a real football, instead it’s pointy at both ends.

 

I loved watching the film.  The ball spun, it had gyroscopic stability and this made it fly pointy-end-first, Therefore air friction was reduced, and this turned that misshapen ball into a leather bullet.

 But the "Gym" professor insisted that I focus on the players playing in front, what they called  linesmen, because I  was considered cannon fodder for the front  lines, and was expected to come to blows with the largest, fattest guys on  the other side. So I looked at  the art of it,  which seemed to be squat, then  launch myself like a battering ram to  give my opponent a huge boost in reverse.  After running over the first guy I found I was supposed to  bend over, run like a gorilla  and grab the guy with the ball, who would be trying to run around me. The move recommended by Frank Tarkenton required that I put him on my shoulder, lift him into the air, and drive him head first in the ground.  

 

This move  was necessary to make him loose his wits and  release the ball.   I could  proceed to throw myself  on it,  and then make myself into a ball (like  a turtle). The turtle position was important because soon thereafter about three tons of flesh would fall down on me to crush me and make me drop the ball.

As we all know, American football is a derivative of English rugby, which they in turn learned from the Maoris. The Maoris used to practice this rugby before singing something called the haka and annihilating their enemies.

 

So the British copied these practices, they began to sing haka and play  Maori rugby. Some of this  tradition remains in  American football,  but to see the wild roots of this game, one has to see how it is played in New Zealand.

 

Returning to my football lessons…I have a good memory,  I was almost  paralyzed in Cuba doing judo,  and I had learned to do  street karate in Madrid.  I was ready. The art of playing  football as taught by Frank Tarkenton was easy to learn.  All I had to do was push, give and take a couple of hits, and then an unfortunate lad had to be stuck head first in the grass until he dropped the ball.

So eventually came the great day.  They took me out of the film room to play for real,  after learning the theory. Curiously, they  hung flags from everybody’s  buttocks, something I hadn’t seen in the Frank Tarkenton film.

Oh, and another thing, I had come from Spain,  and I didn’t  know any English at first. So what they said in the training films and what the "Gym" professor explained sounded as if it were Polish.  So, to help you get an idea and  imagine how it worked, I’ll put down in  Spanish what I said, and I’ll use Polish for what the professor said to me that day:

Professor: “Będziemy grać tooball flag”

Me: “OK”

Professor: Nie używaj niczego uczyliśmy cię

Me: “¿Eh?”

Professor: Będziesz kogoś zabić, jeśli używasz, co cię nauczył

Me: “OK”

Profesor: Po prostu idź tam i spróbować chwycić flagę de off faceta w tyłe

Me: “Si, OK”

I thought the teacher would understand that if answered in Castilian was because I was a little tired of his Polish. So he shrugged and blew his whistle to start the match.

I assumed the linesman  position like in the movie, jumped like a battering ram when I saw the guy in front of me toss the ball between his legs, and gave him a phenomenal shove.   The guy was huge.  But somehow I was able to put my head into his stomach, and made him collapse backwards. Then I saw that the guy with the  ball running towards me.  I grabbed him and threw him head first into the grass as recommended  by Frank Tarkenton.

The guy dropped the ball, and I threw myself on it hoping all would be well, because I knew three tons of people were heading my way. But nothing happened. I looked up and saw the "Gym" teacher running towards me with a red face and shouting in Polish.  I had no idea what was happening. Then  he grabbed me by the arm, led me to one side,  and  sat me down, still glowering  giving me his little speech while I shook my head to calm him down.

Months later, when I learned to speak English, and it no longer sounded as if it were Polish, I learned that we had been playing "Flag Football". It seems  we had hung flags from our buttocks for a reason:  they were there to be taken as a sign that one had knocked down the opponent.  Symbolically, of course.

 

Eventually I learned to grab the flags like the Americans did. They were thrilled because they had believed I was a savage who wanted to cripple my oppponents. Eventually my new playing style and the fact that I learned to speak English like a native made us good friends.  Later,  I  learned to play basketball and to recite baseball statistics like Americans love to do, but that's another story.