If the Venezuelan Law against corruption was enforced...
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Friday, June 06, 2003
By: Gustavo Coronel
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: It is my opinion that President Chavez and most of his team of collaborators would be behind bars. As it is, however, the team is mostly and quietly sitting at bars...
The Law was passed in March of this year and seems written for a country which does not look at all like Venezuela 2003, where ethics in public function is practically non- existent. The almost proud disdain of this government for ethical rules of the game largely explains the immense crisis we are facing.
The Law was passed in characteristic fashion. Citizens had no previous access to the project and were served with a "fait accompli." Even after its passing the law stayed in the subsurface and known onlt to the very few ... it took me about one month to track it down at www.asambleanacional.gov.ve
Having said all this, I think the law is sufficiently stringent to produce the imprisonment of most of the government team if it was enforced. This is not going to happen because the officers in charge of enforcing the law are members of the team ... and these men do not commit political suicide. They'd rather be dishonest.
The Law contains many articles which are of very general nature, so that, although anybody can see that they are being violated, their subjective nature makes it impossible to measure the violation. Article 1, for example, calls for a behavior of public officers which "will protect the public patrimony, will guarantee the transparent and efficient use of public resources, based on the principles of honesty, transparency, participation, efficiency, efficacy, legality, accountability and responsibility..."
This sounds good ... but all we can say is that the reality of Venezuela is to this article as south is to north. Chavez acts in a manner totally opposite to the letter of the article.
To prove my assertion I would have to write a book ... which I might do... In the meantime, however, I will offer some tidbits:
Article 7 reads: "The public officers will manage and protect the public patrimony with decency, decorum and honesty, in such a way that the utilization of assets and the expenditure of public resources be made in accordance with the Constitution..."
As I read this article. I could not help thinking of the 53,000 barrels per day we send to Cuba, under terms which are clearly unconstitutional, as the agreement was not approved by the National Assembly; and highly inefficient and damaging to the national treasury since it involves a huge subsidy of about $1 billion from the poor people of Venezuela to the poor people of Cuba. This is a crime that the Law defines as of lese fatherland ("lesa patria").
Article 8 stipulates that all information about the management of public funds will be made public.
Article 9 dictates that public administrators will keep citizens informed of the way they manage the assets and monies entrusted to them, information that should be published quarterly in a simple and understandable manner.
Article 10 says that all citizens have the right to request this information and receive it promptly. All of this is science fiction under this government and anyone going to a government agency asking for this will be lucky to leave in one piece.
Article 11 establishes that the project of national budget should be consulted with public opinion before going to the National Assembly. This has never been done, although the stipulation already existed in the Law of Public Administration.
Article 13 reads that "public officers are at the service of the State and not at the service of political or economic groups." But Chavez is also the president of MVR, the political party which supports him, while the Bolivarian Circles, the armed groups of the government have their headquarters at the Presidential Palace.
Article 41 says that the General Comptroller will investigate all public officers which contract with the State through companies in which they own shares. General Baduel, one of the military members of the team own or did own shares of a radio station which contracted government advertisement. Although he publicly admitted this, he was never bothered by his friend the Comptroller.
Article 46 defines as illicit enrichment any patrimonial size out of proportion with the income of the public officer. The burden of the proof is on the public employee. And yet the majority of these men and women are clearly living beyond their means, buying real state in Venezuela, Chile and the US that could not be bought on the basis of their salaries. Former Minister Rodriguez Chacin, who reported assets of Bs.70 million as he entered his job, bought a 2,000 acre ranch for Bs.400 million, although real estate experts say that the property is worth more than Bs.1 billion.
Articles 56 and 57 establish prison terms of 6 months to 4 years for any public officer who applies public funds to any other objective than that originally established by law. On the basis of these articles, President Chavez and his then Minister of Finance, Nelson Merentes, should be behind bars. They diverted, illegally and openly, some $4 billion from the Macroeconomic Stabilization Fund to other purposes, largely still unaccounted for. This is the worst case of mismanagement of public funds I have ever seen. The employees Chavez and Merentes were duly denounced ... to no avail.
Article 58 states that "any officer who claims an emergency situation to eliminate the bidding process to acquire public goods and services will be sent to prison for 6 months to 3 years." Yet, a recent Presidential decree collides head on with this law, allowing all government agencies to dispense with bidding procedures due to reasons of exception or emergency. This conflict borders on insanity since the man who guided the law and the man who produced the decree are one and the same. I am reminded of the man who tells a friend: "I thought I had a problem of split personalities, but now I think we are OK"....
Article 66 deals with the utilization of confidential official information for personal gain, a crime punished with prison of 1-6 years and a fine of up to 50% of the benefits obtained (why only 50%?). Economist Orlando Ochoa, highly respected in our economic sector, has just denounced Minister of Finance Tobias Nobrega for this kind of manipulation in connection with external debt bonds. Ochoa also mentioned in a TV program ("Primera Pagina") that the money that should flow from the Ministry of Finance to the regional governments falls in the hands of intermediaries who give less than the amount to financially starved regional entities and pocket the rest. This is a dirty trick used in Venezuela by all dictators since the Monagas brothers were in power in the 1850s. If you wanted to collect a government debt you had to talk to Mrs. Monagas who charged a modest 10% commission.
Articles 70-75 deal with extortion while article 79 deals with influence peddling. Plenty of examples of that among the lesser revolutionaries.
Article 81 establishes prison terms of 1-5 years for anyone opening a personal bank account with public monies. This was standard practice among the military during the brief but intense disaster of the Bolivar 2000 program (see the book of Agustin Beroes: "Corruption in the times of Chavez").
These are only a few examples of the ethical collapse of this regime. This is twice as painful, as this government came to power on the wings of a very strong anti-corruption stance. They came to clean the house but now the house is filthier than ever before.
A final comment: Most of the provisions of this law existed already in previous instruments, such as the Law of Protection of Public Patrimony, in force since 1982.
So, not one of the dedicated defenders of the regime can come now and say that the new rules of the game could not apply retroactively.
This would be such an impudent and cynical defense that I doubt that anyone would dare to use it.
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com
Adjusting to peak oil... Future shock!
Posted by click at 11:27 AM
in
oil
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Friday, June 06, 2003
By: Andrew McKillop
VHeadline.com petroleum industry commentarist Andrew McKillop writes: Like it or not, the world is moving rapidly to absolute peaks in the capacity to find, prove and extract ever more oil and gas. The time to reach Peak Oil, the maximum possible production rate for ‘all liquids’, that is including heavy oil and tarsand or bitumen-based oil as well as conventional crude, is probably less than 7 years depending on how world and regional demand profiles evolve.
This can be understood by just a few figures. The ASPO organization, using widely available data forecasts that world peak oil production will be around 83 Mbd (million barrels per day). The USA with about 285 million population consumes about 20 Mbd. When or if China, with its current 1.25 billion population, achieved today’s rates of per capita oil consumption in the USA it would need slightly more than 80 Mbd. When or if India, with its current 1.1 billion population and, like China experiencing explosive industrial investment and output growth, achieved the same levels of oil consumption and the economic wellbeing (in classic terms) that goes with an energy intense economy, then India would need about 70 Mbd.
Together, China and India would require about 150 Mbd, if we assumed they experienced zero population growth, but continued the current and rapid expansion of their automobile, aerospace, military, consumer manufacturing and urban development sectors, and made no ‘energy transition’ away from oil.
Even if the USA made that transition, and achieved a complete replacement of its current oil utilization by non oil, or domestic-only oil and other sources, the net increase of world oil demand due to China and India attaining 2003 levels of US per capital oil demand would be some 130 Mbd. In theory ... and it is pure theory ... this could take place in not much more than 30 years, for example if China and India made the same progress to industrialization and urbanization achieved by South Korea through 1965-2000.
In fact, not only will China and India increase their oil intensity per capita, from levels that today are far less than one-tenth those of the USA ... but for some while they will also experience continuing population growth, just like the USA.
If we assume that conventional urban-industrial development in a globalized, growth economy is inevitable and unstoppable then future oil demand could in theory attain the fantastic levels suggested above ... but supply certainly will not.
For these reasons, and in an attempt to ‘square the circle,’ agencies such as the OECD’s International Energy Agency calmly publish forecasts that the world will be producing about 120 Mbd in the 2020-25 period. According to ASPO, and a growing number of oil geologists, consultants, advisory groups and ... without openly stating this ... increasing numbers of oil industry majors, this is simply impossible. By about 2010 production, and therefore demand, can only fall if slowly at first.
Economic shock
Whether our doctrinal stance is New Economics, or simple supply-and-demand the impact of flagging supply and increasing demand usually means rising prices. The word ‘usually’ is important because a simple refusal to accept reality can be adjusted for, by the economy and society, through setting unreal prices. In the quite recent past this was specially the case for oil prices ... which exploded in the 1973-81 period, then shrank back to unreal, desultory price levels. This inevitably had a ‘knock on’ effect on prices for natural gas, coal, other minerals, and energy intensive commodities in general.
The merest check on how these violent oil price swings, which were only due to political factors and did not concern resource availability, affected and related to demand and consumption is revealing. Whether at the 3rd Quarter 1979 oil price of the most expensive crudes, at about $103/barrel in 2003 dollars, or the 4th Quarter 1998 oil price in 2003 dollars of about $10.50/barrel for the same crudes, world oil demand and consumption have varied little.
Oil consumption growth rates have only turned into stagnation and then fall in the sharpest, deepest recessions, notably in 1980-83, and then surged again as the world economy again expands. Oil demand growth by the fastest growing Asian industrial countries outside China (the ‘traditional’ New Industrial Countries) was in fact at its most explosive during the period of highest oil prices, during the 10-year period of 1975-85 !
Today, with much lower oil prices, these ‘traditional NICs’ now show much lower growth rates of oil demand. So-called ‘price elasticity of demand’ is far from applicable to this demand pattern, because oil prices, themselves and alone, do not set economic growth trends either nationally or regionally. However, no economic growth as we know the term is possible without oil.
Falling, even collapsing rates of economic growth in the aging, service-oriented economies of the OECD has led to economic growth becoming a leitmotiv, a desperate quest to restore growth without redistribution of wealth by any other means but the market.
Thus economic agencies of the OECD group, like the IEA are constrained to generate unrealistic, impossible forecasts for world oil demand and supply in the near future.
For their 2020-25 forecasts, the IEA and US EIA simply key in a 1.8% annual growth rate for world oil demand and then project vast supply expansion from the Middle East in particular, but also elsewhere. By 2020, according to the US EIA and the OECD’s IEA, the Middle East region could, or should be exporting about 45 Mbd, in order to balance out forecast world supply an demand needs. Including domestic oil needs of these exporters, their total production would need to exceed 53 Mbd ... despite this being almost entirely and completely impossible! Yet the future volume of oil demand that would require these heroic supply efforts is generated by the world’s appetite for oil only growing at about 1.8% per year. In the 1990s, in some years and irrespective of the oil price (sometimes when prices moved up!) oil demand growth in the Asia-Pacific region was often well above 5% per year. In its heyday of economic growth (about 1948-78), the OECD countries often experienced annual growths of oil demand of more than 6%.
Only recession can cut demand growth
Only intense economic, financial or monetary crises can in fact dent what is essentially inelastic demand generating high annual demand growth rates.
An example is the 1997 Asian monetary crisis, which for one year brought the region’s oil demand growth to slightly below zero. In the OECD or richworld economies the 1973-74 oil shock saw a 295% nominal or before-inflation price rise for oil, but demand growth rates of beyond 7% per year for some OECD nations before the crisis only turned into declining consumption for around 18 months in most of these economies.
By 1975-76 OECD country oil demand growth rates had recovered to as much as 3.5% and more each year. In the 1979-81 oil shock, when oil prices reached levels that we will surely see again within a few years, if only market mechanisms set prices, there were declines in oil demand by the OECD nations for 3 straight years (1980-83), but these only attained a total of about an 8.15% cumulative fall in demand, and were only obtained through the blunt instrument of extreme interest rates triggering wall-to-wall recession.
The imminence of entry to a 1929-36 sequence of continual, unstoppable economic decline, and the more prosaic need of the Reagan administration to have their candidate re-elected, ended this flirt with 1930s-style depression.
World oil demand ceased to fall from late 1983 and through 1984, with oil prices in 2003 dollars that were still far above $60 per barrel. In that year, the US economy attained its highest-ever economic growth, at about 7.5% expansion of real GDP (around 4-5 times economic growth rates in the G-8 nations today, with oil prices about one-half the 1984 price in real terms).
From the later 1980s, world oil demand growth increased in all regions, if at lower annual rates than before 1973 in the older industrial economies of the OECD, but at much faster rates in the dynamic Asia-Pacific economies. In the 12-year period since Gulf War-1, a war essentially for cheap oil, world oil demand has increased by nearly 13 Mbd, or about 25% more than the effective and real ultimate oil export capabilities of Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. Using US EIA and OECD-IEA forecasts, world oil demand growth from 2003-10 will add about another 13 Mbd to world demand.
The kind of economic shock needed to ensure continual decline in world oil demand, solely by the price mechanism and without extreme interest rates, is hard to imagine. We could suggest that oil prices would have to exceed $125 per barrel, but the inflation triggered by this would itself lead to much higher interest rates being applied as a panic measure to save the US dollar, Euro and Japanese Yen from meltdown. Higher priced money would then intensely slow economic activity as in 1980-83, but to maintain continual, yearly declines in world oil demand no economic recovery could be permitted. The recession would have to become a depression, and that would then have to become the ‘normal economic environment’. Unemployment rates, in any formerly rich country, would have to be in the 25%-40% range and be maintained at that level. Public financing of education, health, care of the aged, transport infrastructures and the military would be severely impacted, and very likely there would be civil unrest, riot and rebellion.
Those who draw up scenarios of either sudden cuts in world demand, or continual, year-on-year falls in demand by apparently ‘modest and reasonable’ amounts of say 1.5%-per-year, must understand that the world economy, society and political decision-making system is totally unprepared for such horse medicine.
Without any prior warning nor international agreement, and either through unlimited price rises of oil, or by national legislation and rationing, this Final Oil Shock could be brought about – but the consequences would almost certainly include civil war, and quickly lead to international conflict using nuclear weapons.
Economic adjustment
Conversely, oil prices in the $40-$60 per barrel range pose no threat at all to the OECD richworld, and through increasing revenues to energy producers, and exporters of energy intense minerals and agro-commodities, notably in the ‘emerging economies,’ energy sector activity and overall or composite world economic growth rates can be maintained.
The ‘default solution’ or Final Shock of rapidly unmanageable, self reinforcing downturns in activity, employment and investment can be avoided ... prices at the above levels will however send a clear, unambiguous signal of Peak Oil’s certain arrival in an easily defined period of time, and provide some economic underpinning to the obligatory shift towards a low energy economy, mostly and firstly in the richworld OECD nations.
While the Kyoto Treaty mechanism laboriously seeks a regulatory framework for encouraging energy transition, and is ignored by the USA and inapplicable to more than 140 of the 180 countries that have ratified this process for action to limit inevitable climate change, the energy economic framework for adjustment entrained by rising oil prices will operate at all levels of the energy economy. In addition, the Kyoto process, being targeted for effective application from about 2012 (in theory from 2008-12), is unrelated to the very short term horizon that applies for Peak Oil and to which adjustment should begin with the shortest possible delay.
In other words, maintaining current low prices of oil until the 2008-10 period will provide no market signal at all of what will happen to prices after Peak Oil physically impacts world oil supply-demand balances.
After a long period of unrealistically low prices, we will experience a ‘quantum change,’ stepwise leap in oil prices as in 1973-74 or 1987-81 with all that implies in terms of panic driven, ineffective or harmful responses to what, this time, will be permanent and physical shortage of oil.
More than 5 years of potential adjustment through market driven mechanisms will have been lost if no market signals, through higher oil prices, begin to operate in the economy. Investment opportunities in energy saving, economy restructuring and new/renewable energy source development will have been squandered.
Public knowledge, and social acceptance of obligatory but necessarily challenging adaptation and modification of established ways of life will be distorted, harmed or hindered.
In a situation of ‘laisser faire’ non response to perhaps the biggest change in world energy that will ever occur, there is little difficulty forecasting a repeat of the 1980-82 sequence in the world economy. Already rising interest rates were gouged to more than 20% base rates in most OECD countries, entraining a runaway process of stock market loss, business closures and reduction of investment and employment.
Unlike the 1980-82 sequence, however, there would be no return to growth simply through cutting interest rates and allowing oil demand growth to return, firstly through physical shortage and secondly through the price factor.
In a tightening depression with a hostile interest rate environment, economic players would be very unlikely to spontaneously move toward restructuring their activity, plant and equipment, effectively aborting any rapid start of the energy transition process that the single factor of higher and sustained, but not extreme oil and energy prices would and can bring.
Energy industry and energy sector adjustment
To some extent the current ‘US natural gas cliff’ of flagging supply and stepwise increase in prices of natural gas in the USA, notably shifting considerable demand (already about 0.25 Mbd) to oil and increasing US oil imports, is a paradigm of inefficient, market-only ‘response’ to energy resource depletion.
The US gas prospecting industry, downsized through years of very low gas prices, is unable to respond. US oil import increase at this time of tightening world oil supply-demand balances will itself and certainly increase oil price volatility, and only with time leading to sustained and progressive price rises. This in turn will send confused, even contradictory price signals to the energy industry and throughout the energy economy in the short-term.
The period of around 1978-82, in which oil prices attained about $100/barrel in 2003 dollars, saw a flurry of oil and gas prospecting activity, and a short turnaround in long-term oil reserve depletion profiles, both in the US and elsewhere.
Price rises from their most recent lows (of about $9.50/barrel for some crudes in late 1998), to around $28-$30/barrel in late May 2003 have been erratic, strongly affected by political events in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and have not led to any major upturn in prospecting, makeover activity or new production.
To some extent this is due to simple depletion, but is also due an increasingly unrealistic oil and gas pricing environment. Concerted international action to set both floor and ceiling prices for oil and gas, for set forward periods of time, would itself contribute to resolving the problem of an energy industry that is losing industrial capacity and strength every day in an increasing number of countries.
In part this is due to the political context of ‘unfettered markets’ subject to benign neglect, and the mirage of ‘vast’ oil production by the new Iraq. Under no circumstance can Iraq’s albeit large oil reserves ... but currently small production capacity ... prevent Peak Oil from happening. In the very short term of 2003-04 any export offer by the new Iraq will be small and by itself totally unable to compensate for declining supplies from other regions and provinces, given expected and likely world oil demand growth rates.
The downward pressure on world oil prices due to expected and hoped-for supply from the new Iraq, however, will only serve to draw energy investment away from oil and gas activities in other regions and provinces, while maintaining unattractive investment returns in the still fledgling new and renewable energy sector.
That is, in other words, the world energy industry is hostage to a situation of cheap oil’s last fanfare in the Middle East, losing vital industrial capacity and downsizing at exactly that moment when it should be moving towards energy transition.
Without forward development of new industrial capacity, both in fossil and non fossil fuels and energy sources, the period after Peak Oil promises to be chaotic. This again reinforces the need, first, for acceptance of Peak Oil’s reality and imminence, and the setting of international agreements for procedures to deal with it.
Conclusions
There is no difficulty, if we accept the reality of Peak Oil, in drawing up oil-only demand projections featuring annual cuts in consumption and ignoring any question of the oil price.
A sudden stepwise increase in oil prices to even the $80-$90/barrel range will, perhaps ironically, but almost certainly in fact increase economic growth at the world level, leading to yet higher world oil demand, which will then reinforce price rises. This however will entrain an economic and then political context where firstly economic recession and then deep and unyielding economic depression will inevitably set in, in the formerly rich nations of the OECD.
Much better, there should be ‘pre-transitional’ oil price rises to the $40-$60/barrel range, enabling more time for market driven adjustment to start, and to develop. This should be the subject of international agreement much like, but apart from the Kyoto process.
While this of course is somewhat idealistic, it can prevent runaway oil and energy price rises, economic depression, and military responses to what is essentially a geological problem from becoming the default solutions.
The international energy industry will itself be a key player in energy economic restructuring. At present it is a victim of erratic, even incoherent policy and market contexts and lacks critical visibility at this moment in time.
Providing a lead role to the energy industry, firstly through market signals, will be vital to any plan and program for energy transition.
Recent trends show that economic and industrial downsizing ... loss of capabilities ... is accelerating in the industry and must be turned around.
Without this partner in the transition period that will likely start within 6 years if no action is taken and world oil demand growth is set by unfettered market play, there is scant chance of serious and effective responses being set.
Andrew McKillop is a former expert, policy and programming, Divn A - Policy, DG XVII-Energy, European Commission, founder member, Asian Chapter, Intl Assocn of Energy Economists. You may contact Mr. McKillop by email at andrewmckillop@onetel.net.uk
¡VAMOS A ORGANIZARNOS!
Posted by click at 12:03 AM
Un grupo de muchachos “hispanos” que estudiaban en Suiza decidieron organizar una especie de orgía. Al ratico de comenzar la alocada fiesta, Mario Ramírez prendió la luz y gritó: ¡Vamos a organizarnos, vamos a organizarnos…!” Que va: le volvieron a apagar el “suiche” y continuó la parranda. No habían pasado quince minutos cuando Mario volvió a prender la luz: ¡Vamos a organizarnos, vamos a organizarnos…!” La escena se repitió varias veces hasta que uno de los amigos de Mario paró la fiesta al tiempo en que le preguntaba cuál era su interés por organizarse, a lo que éste respondió: “… es que desde que comenzó la fiesta me han seducido equivocada y erróneamente ya diez veces y yo no he podido seducir a nadie todavía ni una sola vez…”
Mientras vivía en el “Conjunto Residencial Potro Redondo”, en la Unión (El Hatillo), asistí a cualquier cantidad de reuniones para llegar a un acuerdo consensuado sobre el tipo de portón electrónico que debíamos colocar en la entrada del estacionamiento a fin de prevenir los múltiples hurtos que comenzamos a sufrir hacía ya un tiempo, entonces. Luego de MIL discusiones me mudé del lugar y al cabo de los años me enteré que al final la junta de condominio había llegado a una conclusión, pero que al colocar el portón éste había durado sano un par de meses y en consecuencia todo había quedado igual, con el agravante del costo que supuso la colocación de aquel adefesio inoperante, producto del consenso vecinal.
¿Moraleja? Los “hispanos” no sabemos ORGANIZARNOS. Nos reunimos y hay tantos “expertos” en la materia que se discute que siempre ponemos el caldo morado.
El pasado jueves 12 de junio asistí a una “Asamblea General de Vecinos” en Terrazas del Tamanaco donde asistieron como ponentes los señores Carratú Molina, Medina Gómez y Alejandro Peña Esclusa. Todos estaban más claros que el agua clara, sin embargo, a la hora de “rematar”, se quedaron en el aparato.
Coincidían todos en que NO HABRÁ REFERENDO NI UN COMINO; en que la pelea será peleando, pero cuando “llegaron al llegadero” en sus intervenciones, lo único que pudieron producir fue una invitación a ORGANIZARNOS.
Yo tenía una señora detrás que insistía en que le respondieran cuándo había que comenzar a organizarse… y quién nos organizaría. Yo intenté preguntarle al General Medina Gómez en cuanto al tipo de organización: ¿bélica? ¿política? Al final – ya al final – le mandé un papelito preguntándole qué creía él de “LA GUARIMBA”, cosa que no me supo responder… porque no sabía muy bien qué cosa era “eso”.
Alejandro Peña Esclusa habló con mucha emoción y nos pidió que nos organizáramos. Ya para cuando al V/A Iván Carratú le tocó el turno de contestar sus preguntas, el público estaba alterado y quería ver sangre… pero nos animó, nuevamente, a organizarnos.
Salí, por supuesto, tremendamente derrotado y deprimido de la “Asamblea General de Vecinos”. Había oído a tres líderes hablando más claro que el agua clara, pero absolutamente incapaces de concluir y de producir una solución práctica, efectiva e INMINENTE. Mientras el régimen CASTRO-COMUNISTA de los señores Chávez y Castro sabe perfectamente qué es lo que quiere, cómo lo quiere y qué debe hacer para obtenerlo, nosotros “guaraleamos” entre pitos y medias tintas, apelando a la organización del pueblo, en un momento en el cual el tiempo hace rato que está en nuestra contra.
Como no brinquemos con un líder “atrincado” en las próximas horas, nos veremos forzados a apagar la vela y coger la de Diego por los caminos del destierro, dejar los dientes en las prisiones que pronto inaugurará el régimen, entrar horizontalmente y con los pies por delante en el cementerio… o morirnos de miseria, encorvados y derrotados, caminando por las calles llenas de nube de esta noble patria de la cual un día salieron los libertadores de casi todo un continente.
Caracas 14 de junio de 2003
ROBERT ALONSO
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